Mass Effect: Survival
by ThemyThink
Summary: We were reckless, we were foolish. We expanded when we should have been preparing. Now Earth is lost to us. Everyone knows this is a fight we cannot win. But that does not mean that the light of humanity will be snuffed out, that we will stop fighting back. There are still remnants of human fleets in the cosmos. As long as they survive, there is hope of survival.
1. Chapter 1

It was dark, very dark. Not a single ray of light pierced the darkness. Then i understood i had my eyes closed. I opened them and saw blood red lights coming from a single source. It then registered to me that i was not alone in the small cramped room. A body was laying half a meter to my left. I tried to move but as soon as i tried to get my feet under myself i felt a burning pain pierce through my leg. I groaned, atleast i think i did, i didnt hear anything but i felt my mouth moving.

My throat was as dry as the saharan desert. I quickly reached for my hip to retrieve my water flask. I grabbed it and ripped it from my belt, quickly opening the lid and drinking from it.

'Nothing, why is there nothing in my flask? I could have sworn i filled it before i took off in my sparrow.'

I brought the flask to my face level and saw the problem, a sizable piece of shrapnell had torn through the flask.

'Im not even mad anymore, if that piece had pierced the flask, i would have bled out by now.'

I pushed myself off the wall and landed with my head in the lap of the other man. Up close i could clearly see that the man was dead. A pen sized hole in your skull with metal sticking out tends to do that to people. But then i saw something on his hip: another water flask. I quickly took it and drank a nice amount of the contents.

With my thirst satiated i could feel my hearing returning. Probably from all the swallowing. Now that i had satiated my immediate needs and had retained the ability to hear, I started to look over my leg and wondered why it hurt to move it.

The leg was thankfully fine in the sense that it was not bleeding but my right calf was totally purple.

'Goddamnit, i guess i didnt get out of that crash uscrathed'

My name is Valmar Oakfield. Flight lieutennant of the EDF. Shot down during operation UPPERCUT. The "brilliant" plan cooked up by the remmnants of the European defence force and NATO forces in Europe to counterract the aliens that had landed in Bern and had made it the base of their European theatre of war.

To be truthful, the operation was doomed from the start. Everyone knew, but noone cared, everyone was tired of running and hiding. Everyone wanted to finally do something to hurt the invaders, not hide and bide their time as General Hide Belli ordered them to do before all communications with Brussels was lost. The city was a ghost town now.

Of the 20 000 soldiers that took part in the operation, only a small percentage were armed with weapons that were capable of reasonably taking out the invaders, namely their own weapons. Everyone else had the good old chemical propelled rifles

There was no real battle, the special operations teams did not manage to open a window in the enemy anti air battery lines. So when I and the rest of the pilots came in with the first wave of troops and vehicles, we were shot down in seconds.

I was transporting a Blitz class light tank under my rails and had its crew and 5 army grunts onboard.

when i was hit i lost my tail rotor so i spinned out. Most of the grunts got spewed out of the chopper by the centrifugal force because they had unclipped themselves to get down to the groun faster. I guess they succeded, they certainly did get to the ground faster than normal.

when i crashed i crawled out of the mangled remains of my chopper and dragged one of the tanks crewmen into the tank. I intended to go after the other survivors but some of the enemy must have seen me moving and had shot a rocket at the tank. The last thing i remember is trying to climb out of the hatch and seeing it rush towards my face.

I am too scared to make any noise as i remember that i am in a dead tank in enemy occupied territory. Suddenly the radio makes a sound.

"Any*zzzzz*on th*zzz* cha*zzzz*-group at ra*zz* point sac*zzzzzzzzzz*.

After the female voice cuts out I immediatelly start thinking.

'Rally point sac. Rally point sac. I dont remember being a rally point by that name. Although maybe they mean rally point sacramento.'

I pull back the sleeve of my uniform and look at the smartwatch which i set to display a map that i had downloaded to it. To my dismay the smartwatch was warped beyond recognition. At places it was melted and at places it has pieces totally missing.

"Damnit" I say to myself. "Gotta find another way topinpoint my location"

I stand up and push the hatch that leads out of the tank, only to curse as i realised that it was jammed shut.


	2. Chapter 2

Mass Effect: Survival Ch 2

"Perfect. Just blody perfect. Of course the lid is shut and the emergency hatch cannot even open because the goddamn idiots in R&D thought that it would be a good idea to make the escape hatch open outward. Goddamn idiots."

With that out of my system i decide to check what gear i have available. To give myself something to do as to not panic and who knows, maybe the guy i dragged in had a portable welder.

Five minutes later i was croutching over a multitude of items that i got from the now identified tank gunner, sargeant Thomas Shultz.

"Lets see. An H&K PM24 (Hahne-Kedar) with three mags. A combat knife and a sharpening kit. I wonder where you were hoping to use this. Six MRE packs and half a liter of water. Oh, and a shaped charge. What the hell am i supposed to do with these. the water will last me for a day and the MRE packs are useless because i have no excess water to hydrate if i use the shaped charge on the hatch the pressure wave will make me into a pile of red goo."

"Sigh"

I packed all of the found items into my pack. Just in case i get an oppurtunity to get out of the tank later, and to give me something to do. As long as i can do something i wont get a panic attack. And when that was done i started sharpening the knife whitch i got from the dead guy.

Just as i was starting to give up hope i hear a loud rumble. Like one of our jets before all of them got swatted out of the sky.

'Wait a second. Why is the rumbling getting louder and lou..."

 _ ***CRASH***_

the shockwawe of what must have been an emergency landing by one of our few airplanes pushed the light tank on its side and i was flung across the room, only to impact shoulder first with the gunners seat.

I mentally thanked the gunner and then noticed that the interior was not only red from emergency lights as it used to be but there was a little glimpse of sunlight coming from the bottom escape hatch. Well, what used to be the bottom hatch. Now it might as well be a small side window because the tank is on its side.

I quickly push down the need to cheer over how my luck had changed and decided to just get out of the tank.I threw the equipment bag out infront of me and grabbed ahold of the commanders seat, heaved myself to the other side of it and put my good leg on the edge of the window and pushed myself out.

Once i got out, I landed on my equipment bag whitch made me hiss in pain because the outermost pocket held my sharpening kit. I forced the pain away and pushed myself up.

There was none of the usual heat or flames of an airplane crash. Only pieces of some weird dark armor whitch i have never seen on an airplane. And a nice big hole in the apartment to my left. Before rushing over to the crashed vehicle i run over to one of the dead soldiers i was transporting. Taking his water flask and his H&K Archangel I assault rifle with a spare magazine, all the other magazines had some damage that could hinder their usage.

I stacked on the front door of the apartment that held the unidentified craft and pushed the door. You could imagine my surprise when the door actually opened.

I refused to look a gif t horse in the mouth and continued walking towards the stairs. When i reached the stairs i understood why the door was opened. What looked to be an execution wall was set up in the living room and half a dozen people in swiss uniforms were slumped on the ground.

"Goddamn bastards, these men probably surrendered, they dont even have weapons on them."

Refusing to stop for too long i slid each of their eyes closed and took their dogtags. It doesnt matter that there wont be anyone to give them over to, some traditions will have to be kept.

After the quick honoring of the fallen I sneak up the stairs to see some more blood on the carpet, but this time the blood is purple and not too far away i see a single invader. Funny, if the war hadnt happened i could see myself hitting on one of these ladies, for a lady she was, nice big busom and ass. Only way that you could distinguish them from human was their shin colour and that they had no hair on their body. Weird thing is that there is not a single doccumented case of seeing a male on. Only females.

The woman was holding a weird purple and white gun that looked distinctly alien with its curves and illogically shaped barrel. Although reports say that the gun has a fast rate of fire and almost never runs out of ammo.

I quickly pick up the SMG and look the alien over for any other gear. Human forces are advised to pick up any alien weapons they find because they are usually much more effective than human ones. Plus you never run out of ammo, how cool is that.

The door next to the dead alien is open and i can see the floor dissappearing from about 2 meters into the room. The room might have once been a living room judging from the couch it the corner of what is left of the building. But my interest is not on the room or the ruined house interior. But my attention was the hulking ship that i realise is a split lip assault shuttle. Identified by the two big guns on the side that could probably chew up a whole tank collumn with a single pass. The shuttle itself seems lightly damaged from what i can see. The paintjob is a wreck and one of the frontal thrusters seems to be sparking a bit.

Suddenly the hatch on the side opens and out steps one of the split lips. The alien has some weird looking blue and white armor on that does not look like it can take a single bullet. But looks can be deceiving. All of the aliens I have encountered have always had some kind of invisible shield covering them.

Suddenly the split lip speaks in pure english as he pulls out his pistol. "I know your there human, come out and i wont shoot you. Thats a promise."

I pick up a shard of glass off the floor and hold it out so i can see the alien from the reflection.

"Come on human, dont be shy. Were only going for a little trip"

I can see his fingers, or what pass for fingers for him and see that he has his finger on the trigger and the trigger finger is twitching. No way is he going to spare me, he is just waiting for me to get out of cover so he could shoot me. Well, as a friend used to say, alot: No way hose.

I jump to the right and spray the alien with the looted SMG. The alien looks very surprised. No doubt he expected someone unarmed. But either way his pistol spat out a few rounds and missed me by millimeters. All the while my weapon had taken out his shields that made a popping sound and filled him with lead or whatever these guns use. I quickly holstered the gun and went to check on the body.

The door that was behind the split lip was colored dark blue and i stopped for a second thinking how utterly different our species were when i saw him still moving and his omnitool flaring up. I pulled out my pistol and shot the alien in the head. Thanks to his shields still being down the bullet made contact with his face and went through his eyeball.

His omnitool was still active and i detached it from the aliens wrist and connected it to mine. The reason i know what an omnitool is, is that one of my friends had an Omni M1, a very expencive piece because it was humankinds first first design, and as with the mobile phone it was large and felt weird but everyone likes hologramms so it was a huge success. the human version looked more like a bulky glove that had a wrist portion, while this one was more like three wires that sticked to the users skin.

I shrugged and looked at the holographic screen, i wont understand anything anyway. But then i realised that i could. I looked at the former owner.

'Was he really that stupid as to set a full translation from whatever he speaks into human? Was he mentally challenged or something?'

The only reason we are not picking up the alien omnitools is that we cannot understand a word of whatever language the aliens are using, but now i could actually understand the information on the screen i could use it.

"One mans misfortune is another mans luck. Well another aliens to be precise but who cares." I mutter to myself as i browse the apps the alien had on his omnitool. A flashing app on his dashboard or the alien equivalent to it drew my attention and i click it. Out pops a headline that says Codex. I can see pictures descriptions and and videos.

I start reading the so called codex and understand that the alien at my feet is a turian and the blue alien chick who i got my gun from was an asari.

Realising the omnitool had a treasure trove of information on it but that i didnt have the time to look further into it because i am pretty exposed at that moment, standing in the rubble next to an enemy shuttle. I jump into the shuttle to actually get some cover incase some sniper gets tired of my existence and blows my head off.

Inside is a pretty pristine interior, a shock because the shuttle just crashed into a stone building so it should be messier than a garbage dump. I press the button next to the open door to have it close and sat down for a more in depth study of the omnitool.

I was so engrossed with the device that i almost didnt notice the female form creeping up on me. so when i finally noticed she was ready to pounce. A blue orb was sent towards me that knocked the wind out of me and threw me against the wall. She was ontop of me before i could get up. Her hand glowing with blue heatless fire as she brought it down on my head. I threw my head to the side and dodged the punch. she didnt let me capitalise on her momentary lack of balance and started choking me with her other hand, bringing her punching hand up again, both of her hands flaring as she tried to off me. I was scared out of my mind when i remembered the knife in my leg holster. My hand darted to the knife sheath where i fumbeled with the latch holding the knife in whilst dodging another punch to the face. Those punches are no joke, i have seen marines get hit with one punch and have the hand go _through_ their bodies.

As i was fumbling with my knife with one hand my other hand was punching the side of the asari and trying to push her off of me, but to no avail. As my face was bright red i finally got my knife free and stabbed it into her ribs.

I could se that it was a total surprise for the asari. I capitalised on that surprise and simultaineously pulled out the knife and pushed her off of me. I quickly got my feet under myself whild enjoying the pleasant feeling that is oxigen going through my lungs. My muscles burned and as i recovered i could see the asari weakening.

She spat at me "You primitive bastard. No matter, you shall die like the rest of your primate race." With those words off her lips her eyes dimmed and she went limp.

I sat back down on the bench, feeling my body protest against further activity. Before i could pass out from the adrenaline rush wearing off, I heaved the dead asari on my shoulder, took her omnitool, opened the shuttle door and threw her on her turian companion.

Then i felt the adrenaline wearing off. The deep weariness coming over my body and the last thing i could think of were praises to the soldier i took the knife off of.

AN: I wrote the first chapter from something that kept bugging me and now i just felt that i should continue it. I thought that there are way too few stories telling from a viewpoint of a humanity that lost the first contact war. Note that this is a completely AU. I will do some world building with another chapter later on. As you can see pretty much every council race is mentioned in this chapter so i will give a reason for the whole council to go to war against the humans in the timeline which i must say again will not be easily recognisable because this is an AU.

 **Codex:**

H&K- Hahne Kedar combat applications company, makes armor for the EDF and the AC. Had started going into weapons production when the first contact war began. The weapons produced by H&K were not pretty much railguns with low rate of fire but high penetration, good against unshielded but heavily armoured targets because shields negate the slugs velocity because they are tuned to handle mass effect slugs whitch travel many times faster.

Omni M1- Humanitys first mass produced omnitool, expencive and vey crude by citadel standards it nonetheless got the job done.


	3. Timeline

Mass Effect: Survival

Timeline:

January 24 2016- American mars probe discovers artifitialmaterials in a soil scan. before the information can be classified it is leaked to the general public.

May 12 2017- A manned international spaceship was sent to mars to investigate the anomaly.

August 4 2017- The mission named Farseer made it planetside on mars. Drilling for the metal location begins

August 6 2017- The prothean ruins are discovered and the science team that came along for the mission get to work.

2017-2020- Humanity makes leaps and bounds with the tech reverse engineered from the now identified Prothean ruins. Charon relay is opened and no laws against opening relays are set. Rapid Human expansion. All settelments are small and have minimal military presence because the earthern nations have not unified. Mass accellerator technology found in the weapons left behind by the Protheans has not been cracked. Human scientists conclude that the guns are too damaged to succesfully reverse engineer, more precise instruments needed to even have a chance of replicating them.

2021-2022- Human unification wars occur. earth is now divided by 6 different superpowers. The European Union consisting of European countrys from the Atlantic ocean to the Ural mountains. The Morning Empire stretches from The Urals To India and mainland indochina. The Arabic union who controll the arabic peninsula and north africa. Their eastern border touches the morning empires on the old pakistan. india border. The adfrican union is well... Africa without the northern part. The Pan-Australian league. And finally the American Union, consisting of all the former countries of both americas.

2022-2023- Rapid expansion continues while humanity has less than 50 ships which are being governed by the newly created Systems Alliance. Systems Alliance orders railgun technology based weapons for all its servicemen/women

June 15 2024- First contact at shanx goes bad after turian fleet tries to board an alliance cruiser orbiting shanx for posessing nuclear armaments. The cruiser the SSV Minsk self destructs using those same nuclear weapons after the turians took the engine bay. The self destruction destroyed the cruiser and the boarding turian frigate.

June 16-18 2024- By twisting the truth their way turians gain the support of the council for the invasion of shanx. fighting ensues but is largely finished by the first day. Shanx was settled by the Morning Empire and had a massive nuclear arsenal. The arsenal is launched at council forces and almost 500 000 people died. The shanx colony had less than 6000 humans. The council is at an outrage. Human pacification is authorised.

June 23 2024- alliance first fleet arrives to the shanx system but is oblitterated. Remaining vessels limp to hidden fallback points to repair the damage and to start harassing the council forces.

August 20 2024- all human colonies are pacified. Alliance fleet remmnants declared little more by pirates by council.

August 25 2024-2032 Siege of Earth. Multible attempts at landing forces are made but repelled by masses of groundside nuclear weapons. Multible requests of orbital strikes denied by the council. on the third year of the siege Council forces finally get footholds all over the globe due to earth simply running out of nukes. After that it is almost two years until the whole globe is officially under invader controll. Human resistance forces continue fighting but are whittled down little by little.

July 4 2032- Operation UPPERCUT was the last attempt by EU remmnant forces to destroy the heart of the Councils operations in Europe. The operation is a failure, scattering the remmnants of the once million strong 8. army.


	4. Chapter 4

Mass Effect: Survival

Ch3

When i came to it was with a killer headache. What can one expect after being choked by an alien that has some kind of super grip. I knew that the alien could have killed me, her punches were strong enough to dent the metal plating underneath me. SAo it isn't a stretch to imagine her crushing my throat.

As i staggered up from my prone position I noticed that my H&K was still standing where i put it. I walked over to it and slung it across my shoulder.

As I was still alive and not in a cell, I knew that the blue alien was the last one on the shuttle, so I didn't bother with checking over the rest of the shuttle looking for enemies.

Instead I went outside to check the damage the shuttle had sustained. The alloy might be some night indestructable thing by human standards, but usually crashing into a stone building leaves its mark.

So i found myself stepping out of the small shuttle and immediatelly regretting it. As it was july it was almost 30 degrees outside and in warm weather bodies decompose fast. The result of me leaving the two dead aliens right infront of the shuttle door was a smell so horrible I thought that i was going to puke.

Judging from the smell I had been passed out for atleast a day or so. The changes in the city were obvious. The gunfire that could still be heard after i woke up from the crash was gone. Replaced by total silence, only the ambient noises of a dead city and the occasional flyby by alien gunships and shuttles.

I stopped breathing through my nose and moved to the damaged front left thruster. When i got to it, I could clearly see the problem. The thruster was warped and scorched, and it was missing the lower half of itself.

'Nothing i have is repairing that.'

I gave up on even trying to repair the thruster as i had no experience with alien thrusters, nor human ones for that.

Knowing that i could not hijack the shuttle I went inside to check for any supplies as the Invading forces usually got supplied by the same ships as this one. And boy did i Find stuff.

The transport was not transporting weapons and other supplies to troops but it was transporting human made armor, weapons and cultural artefacts like literature, paintings and such. All the weapons and armor were pretty banged up but all human armors are modular, with only the basis of the suits not interchangable. So when i saw a Spectre Medium variant armor, exclusive to the best human spec-ops soldiers, with only a few more serious dents and scrapes on it, i grabbed it. The helmet was a no-go because the guy was killed with a headshot, and it was filled with dried brain matter, not to mention the fist sized hole going through it.

Thanks to all human armors being modular i could pick up the T-model assault helmet from another armour set that was so full of holes that it looked like a pincushion.

'These must have come from the SAS boys attacking the AA guns, poor bastards.'

There were other, better armour variants around but they all were either in the wrong size or were too damaged to even attempt recovery.

Shifting through the crates of looted human weapons, armor and ammo, I found the single newest human rifle around, M41A rifle is one of the last rifle series released before the aliens breached the orbital perimiter. The gun was designed to compensate for the power of the shot with volume, shooting 10×24mm caseless rounds that are armor piercing and caseless. The rate of fire is better than what the aliens guns have and the explosive tips are made to bring down shields fast. Add on the small rocket launcher mounted on it and you get a very mean weapon. The gun is so rare that only the best of the best are issued with these babies.

There was no doubt, I picked up the M41A and set my older H&K down. The gun had served me well. When that was done I hurried over to one of the ammonition containers and, without even bothering shifting through it first, pushed it sideways, so that the clips would come pouring out.

I picked up a backpack from the pile of equipment and started stuffing them full of the clips I needed. Each clip had to be checked for previous uses, didn't want to have a 30 round clip when thinking i had a 99 round clip.

In the end of that scavanging run I had 20 clips and 7 grenades for the gun and about 600 or so open rounds along with empty magazines that I will need to load into the gun when in a safer place. Because sitting in an alien shuttle crash site for too long is not a good idea.

So I took the stuff, drank most of my water reserve and got to the shuttle door when suddenly, an idea struck.

'Why don't I boobytrap the shuttle'

I quickly grabbed a few surplus grenades from the stash and tied the pins together with a tripwire. Then I attached the grenades to a bench next to the door with another piece of rope and opened the door halfway. Once that was done i tied the tripwire to the half open door so that it was not lax and jumped out. Using the looted omnitool to close the door I scribbled on the door of the shuttle the sign for explosive ordinance so that any friendly forces could avoid it and took off.

I ran out of the apartment building and into the streets, looking to put as much distance between me and the crash site as possible. I immediatelly regretted running out because i pretty much collided with an asari patrol. Both sides were staring at one another, shocked about the others sudden appearance. The three asari in the patrol were frozen solid. I was the first one to get over the shock and react to the aliens. I dived behind a burned out car on the wrecked street and it seemed that as soon as i moved the asari did too. All of them glowed purple and drew their guns. Just as i got my whole body behind the car a mass of bullets soared over by head and impacted the car. The volume of fire so great that to peak out would be to die. To get out of my position i took out a grenade, a flashbang to be precise, and threw it over my cover. The asari were not wearing helmets so i knew it would work. I darted out of cover and ran for the nearest alleyway. the map of the area allready in the helmets HUD, reinforcing my thoughts of it belonging to an SAS soldier attached to the 8. army.

The effect of a flashbang is greatly reduced on asari because of their lack of ear lobes and Eyes that recover from a flash quicker than humans. So it was no surprise that I felt bullets pinging off of my armor and other objects in the alleyway only 40 or so seconds after the grenade detonated.

I jumped behind a big green dumpster, knowing that a single stray shot to the neck area would mean death. The dumbster was only good for obscuring their line of sight on me, because the smaal rounds started penetrating the container as soon as I took cover behind it. Nonetheless the thing managed to slow the shots down enough to make them ineffective against my armour.

Leaning out of cover, i gave off a couple of bursts. Just to keep them from advancing and giving them a chance to shoot me point blank. The asari i fired at looked surprised when her barrier dropped, but before i could take out her shield, I was forced back into cover.

I understood that there was no point in staying behind the metal container that was becoming an imitation of swiss cheese, with all the holes. I put my gun over my holy cover and fired blindly until the magazine clicked empty. Rising up, I ejected the empty magazine mid run and put in a new one from my equipment pockets. The run was over fast as i crashed into a rusted metal door shoulder first. The door shook but did not fall like i hoped.

Instead of having a quick exit strategy, i now was out in the open without any cover. Pulling a grenade from my belt, I tried tossing it over to the enemy, only to finally have my luck running out. A shot penetrated the lighter elbow plating on my right hand just as i had pulled the pin.

"AAAAGH"

My hand went limp, the primed grenade falling out of my hand. Although the pain was excrutiating, I still had the countdown until a gory death going on in my head. Time slowed down as i tried saving myself.

 **1**...

I looked around panicing, trying to see where the grenade had fallen.

 **2**...

Isaw the grenade, lying infront of my right foot. Collecting my strenght, I gave the explosive a strong kick like I was kicking a football back in school. The grenade flew away from me at full speed towards the other end of the alley.  
 **3...**

 **"BOOOOOOOM"**

The grenade exploded, pulling down the wall of one of the buildings in the alleyway, traping me with the asari with only my left arm combat capable. I pulled out the smg i got from the dead asari in the apartment and started spraying away at the aliens.

I fired in short bursts, trying to control the recoil of the unfamiliar gun while backing off behind a piece of the wall that had come down. Suddenly one of the asari stood up, finally understanding that i could barely aim with the gun, and threw a blue orb at me.

I tried dodging the orb, only to have it adjust its trajectory, and impact my chest. The blue orb thing warped the metal of my chestplate, making me wince in pain when the warping metal tore into my skin.

Another one popped up and threw another one of the blue balls. This time a smaller albeit faster one. In that moment, I made peace with myself, knowing that i was not going to survive the orb that was no doubt going to eat through my armor and kill me.

It was a complete surprise then when the orb impacted me and threw me against the wall, making me feel as if some truck had hit me. As i was starting to get up and raise my gun, my whole world turned blue, and i could not move anymore. The only thing i could do was move my eyes. All other motion felt like I was trying to lift a cruiser with my bare hands.

So there I lay. Helpless. Immobile. Waiting to be shot and left in the alleyway to rot. When one of the blue chicks comes up to me, holding a bundle of rope, the rope having a noose knotted on to it.

The woman had a sadistic smile on her face. She was petting the rope like it was a puppy. One of the others looked indifferent but the second one looked disgusted.

"My My, what do we have here girls? A real live human, and a soldier as well. Oh this day keeps getting better and better." the one with the rope said in a sickly sweet singsong voice, slowly stepping closer.

"Thats enough T'Vanas, just because they are barbarians does not mean that we need to torture them. Just get it over and done with." Said the third. While looking completely calm and unremorseful, she pulled out her pistol and shot me almost point blank in the leg.

Any mercy I was hoping from any of them vaporised, they were going to hang me. A very slow death by anyones standards. I couldnt do anything even when the blue barrier that was keeping me from moving fell and one of the blue women started dragging me towards a lamp post that was still relatively intact.

The indifferent one set me down in a leaning position and watched over the other two as they set up the Noose and went to find something to drop me from.

I was groggy, the world infront of my eyes was swimming like i was drunk and my thoughts became slow. But even then, there was one thing in my mind, I had to take down as many of them as i could. As i remembered i still had a couple of grenades on my bandolier. If i could detonate them, I could take all four of us out. But right now I had only one of them near me, so i had to wait. Why not pass the time with a little chit chat.

"Wh-why are you doing this" The bloodloss was slowly getting to me, I knew it.

The asari looked at me, surprise clearly written on her face. "What do you mean why, your people brought this onto themselves when you burned Tamaris and the cities of Serrice and Armali."

The only thing i could do is chuckle at that and mutter to myself "So old Hackett is still kickin'. Why am i not surprised."

The surprise on the asaris face was replaced by anger at my chuckling as she apparently did not like me laughing over the destruction of one of her peoples colony worlds and two cities. She lashed out and kicked me in my shot arm.

"Arrrgh. Was that necessary, you bitch"

"Why would you laugh over billions of people dying?" Was her quick answer to my question.

"Look around you. What do you see? Ruins, corpses and broken dreams, it's all that is left of my people, and it's your peoples doing. So hearing that we atleast gave you a blody nose is like music to my ears."

The asari luckily didn´t hit me again and just settled to sitting on a burned out tank turret that was slightly rusty. She activated her omnitool and started doing something on it.

Feeling my body starting to numb and having difficulties breathing, I removed my helmet. Taking a captule off my belt i cracked it open and poured its contents over the wound on my arm and repeated the process with the wound on my leg. The wounds started sealing themselves and i noticed the asari watching in wonder. She was just starting to ask a question when the other two returned from a derelict shopping centre with a shopping cart. The asari left to guard me snapped to a more alert stance and adopted a neutral look.

"D'riare, get that stinking bag of flesh up." Shouted the one called T'Vanas to my guard who dragged me up, although alot more gently than before. The shopping cart was placed upside down and i was pushed onto it by two of the asari and hauled to my feet by the third.

I had them right where i wanted them, all clustered together and too busy to notice a quick hand movement. So I darted my hand to my grenade bandolier to pull the pins when i got a glowing knee to my groin and a noose around my neck.

T'Vanas chuckled "Do you think you are the first to try that boy. I've had many hangings and many have tried this, but i let them have their false hope of going out with a bang because it keeps that spark of life and hope in their eyes alot longer when they suffocate."

Having my hopes crushed by this evil bitch of an alien was not new to me, after all this was not my first hanging, although last time I had no grenades on me.

The three asari pulled me up and tied the other end of the rope to the tank turret D'riare was sitting on before and gathered for the spectacle that was my hanging.

Preparing for it i repeated what i did last time, I sucked in alot of air as inconspicuosly as possible and Tensed my throat muscles. Then, Suddenly, I felt the cart dissapearing from under me and the sudden choking that I was doing. I struggled, as any person would, but eventually the pain subsided and my struggling grew weaker and weaker by the second.

After a few more seconds the asari walked away, leaving me to hang, they had a patrol to finish. As soon as I safely could i reached out my hand and pulled the knife from its sheath and started cutting the rope, putting all the strenght left in my body into it and cut the rope, dropping me down with a heavy thud and finally allowing me to breathe again.

Then i started using reserves that i didn't even know existed and dragged myself below a slab of concrete that formed the ceiling of an arteficial cave/shelter thing, snagging my helmet as i went. Then i crawled into the cave and passed out.


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: Okay, havent done one of these in this story yet, atleast I think I havent. This chapter is not the product of a single night of writing and because of that can be clunky, if anyone notices some weird plot holes or something like that, please let me know. I apreciate all the reviews I have gotten and apologise I have not answered them but there is not much to say about them. If you ask questions in the reviews or PM me then I would be glad to answer them. The story idea came from me being just tired from reading stories where humanity just curbstomps everybody else. I mean comon, humans were the newest and least advanced major race (I am not counting vorcha or krogan) who are simply outclassed everywhere, the only reason humanity did not get destroyed by the turians was the council interveining and negotiating a cease fire. If the turians wanted to make humanity into a client race or destroy us, provided they were not stopped by the council, they could have done it. Not easily, but still, they had the capability. So I decided, after reading another humanity-superior everything else- inferior story, to make my own. I took most of my inspiration from Mass Effect: The Hopeless War by ProfFartBurger.

In this chapter a couple of people are going to be acting ooc so forgive me that but honestly, at the moment of writing those parts I was too tired to care about anything and writing felt like a chore.

Ch4

Waking up hurt. That's the thought that went through my head when I came to in the small cave/pile of rubble. Every inch of my body hurt from the lack of oxygen that it went through. I instinctivelly reached for my watch, only to remember that i had lost it a few weeks ago.

As the word 'clock' went through my head my arm lit up with orange and displayed some numbers. It took me a moment to understand that those digits were displaying the time.

04.29

'Huh, so I have been unconsious for about twelve hours.'

Crawling on all fours, I got out of my shelter and tried to stand up. Only to fall down because my feet could not hold me. As I lay there, In the ruins of a dead city, I heard one noise that smothered out my own breathing and the ambient noise. My stomach was growling like an old tank engine.

Remembering I still had the MRE pack and some water in my canteen, I fished out both from my pack and combined them into a meal that was only slightly bland to me. Probably because I was so hungry, because never before had they tasted even remotely good.

I put the MRE into a pouch on the front of my armor and crawled to where I had left my helmet, right next to the lamp post. When i reached my helmet I magnetized it on my hip and laid down. Taking out the MRE I started eating from it like an animal. With fingers and all that. Having consumed the so called 'food', I took my helmet and put it over my head, allowing it to pressurise the inside of my suit.

I waited a couple moments for the pressurisation to begin, only to slap myself on the helmet. I had two bullet holes in my armor, medigel might have fixed the wounds but the holes remained. taking out the emergency sealant from its slot, I liberally squeezed the paste on the holes. Removing the suit would hurt like hell and reopen the wounds.

Medigel was one of the finest inventions made by mankind during the time when we still had controll of the planet. It could fix many of the smaller, and some of the larger wounds soldiers usually sustained during prolonged combat. Making the role of battlefield medics almost obsolete. Almost every soldier was issued medigel before the invasion forces broke through. It being relatively easy to make once one knows how, meant that even after all of the factories and storage depos were emptied or destroyed, human soldiers could still manufacture it in their semi-permanent bunkers and strongholds.

Knowing that I needed to rest before I could move on, but needed a weapon to defend myself made me crawl to the pile that had been my equipment. The asari trio had just left most of my stuff here, only taking the human guns and ammunition, saying that in a couple of centuries some turian gun nut would give them a fortune for them. The only weapon left behind was the smg that was dropped ontop of the pile of equipment. Having no other option, I picked up the gun and put it on the magnetic plate on my right leg.

Finally ,having the small assurance of a weapon, I crawled back into the shelter. Knowing that I could not sleep in an unsecure place like this, I opened up the omnitool and started browsing the alien equivalent of internet. Focusing my efforts to the aliens side of the war, I chuckled when the reason for the aliens to join the war came apparent. Did they seriously expect a sovreign power to just allow one of their vessels to be boarded by some hostile sounding aliens who they even could not understand.

Remembering the asari who guarded me say something about us burning some of their planets, I searched for the locations on this 'extranet' that was their equivalent of internet. What I found made me smile. Evidently the alliance fleet remmnants had seized some alien vessels and loaded them with shielded nuclear weapons and had staged a multitude of assaults all over whatever 'concil space' was. most of them were foiled but many of the aliens cities and important locations were burned with nuclear fire. Serrice, armali, Cipritine (capital of palaven), and some colony worlds were wiped off the proverbial map. This had happened back in 2030 and that explained why the aliens went from taking prisoners to shooting almost everyone, even the people they had in prison camps. The war had effectivelly changed from one of subjugation to one of extermination.

By the time I had read through the files almost an hour had passed and i finally felt myself strong eneough to continuetrekking...somewhere. So I got up and this time stayed up. Moving over to my backpack of gear, I picked it up and started to head towards a street that, from the look of my HUD map, would take me towards one of the resistance's supply stashes set up in the city. I had went maybw fifty meters when I remembered that the knife still laid there where I had dropped it when i got myself out of the noose. Jogging back, taking the knife and sheathing It took a few minutes because I had to find it amids the rubble. But once I had it back I set out again on my way. Every once in awhile I would come across rusted guns, piles of cartridges and bodies, some uniformed, most not. The only surprises were when I found a dead turian and liberated his heavy looking pistol from him and when I had to play dead when a joint patrol of turians and asari passed through the street i was on.

Traveling through the ruins of the jewel of the EU, I felt sorrow. The human species was not going to go extinct. The fleet was still out there somewhere along with all the civillian vessels the alliance could find, all loaded to the brim with people and supplies to last them and even set up a colony or two. But earth, mother terra was probably lost for us forever. Even if we could set up a colony or two, we could not reach the numbers we had before. We had what? 10 billion or more when the aliens struck. Now we are lucky if we have ten million or so people fighting the aliens over the whole planet.

Deep In thought, I almost missed the sound a charging lever on a gun makes when it is pulled. Immediatelly I tensed up, knowing that jumpy soldiers had shot eachother before. Slowly I raised my hands as a sign of peace, and called out.

"Lets not make any sudden moves. Okay?"

Silence was my only answer for several seconds until three words were spoken.

"Give me freedom."

That single phrase made me pause in shock for a moment. Could they actually be survivors from the attack? Am i not alone anymore? All those thoughts ran through my head but knowing I would be shot if i did not answer soon I blurted out the countersign.

"Or give me death."

As soon as I said those words one of the metal pieces on the ground shifted and from under it came a brunette woman with a big alien rifle in hand. A redheaded woman peaked from a window on the second floor and from both sides of me appeared two men.

The woman on the second floor quickly looked around the alley and motioned me to come into the building she was in. I complied, chances were she had higher rank than me and it was good to link up with friendlies after these last tiring days. The brunette followed me in and closed the door.

When I got inside, I was surprised to see a radio setup in the corner and some portable monitors with what looked like motion tracker displays showing on them. That would explain how they knew I was coming. Except for the corner with the outpost setup, the house was just piles of rubble that had once been pieces of furniture and ceiling. A man was sitting behind the monitors in an old office chair. He just looked over his shoulder, nodded to me, and went back to looking at the monitors.

When I got to the second floor of the building the first thing I noticed was all the equipment lying around. mines, carparts, explosives, guns, ammo, food, water purifiers you name it, they probably had it. Most of the machinery though looked broken and most of the guns looked like they had been blown up more than once. There were cots set up in one end of the room and and in the other there was a desk behind what the redhead was sitting. She was wearing some unfamiliar type of black and red heavy armor, it was scraped and dented at places but it looked well cared for, as well as can be expected from a guerilla fighter who are short on everything.

As i noticed her sitting there, I also noticed the bars on her shoulders that signified that she was a commander. I immediatelly snapped to attention. We might be guerilla fighters with units sometimes fighting against eachother for supplies but most of us still respected rank.

"Flight lieutenant Oakfield reporting for duty ma'am."

The woman just looked up raised her finger in the universal sign for 'give me a sec' and whispered into the small microphone infront of her mouth. when that was done she stood up and moved to another table whitch had a map on it. She motioned me to stand beside her. When I got there she finally spoke.

"Names Shepard. You from the fift?"

"Yes ma'am 278th squadron attached to the fift army."

"Were you a pilot or a part of the service crew?"

"I was a pilot, I flew a littlebird transport gunship before I was shot down."

Shepard looked like she was having an inner conflict but she resolved whatever it was and looked at me.

"Can you pilot an alien shuttle?"

The question took me by surprise, as far as I knew, nobody had successfully hijacked an alien vehicle and survived. I couldnt be sure if I could fly it, but I had a look into the crashed shuttle cockpit when I was over there and the setup was almost a carbon copy of human shuttles.

"I can't be certain but I have seen their cockpits look like they are almost the same as ours and I am shuttle rated so I'm pretty sure I can."

Shepard gave me a hard look with her forest green eyes, probably making sure I wasn't lying, and activated her radio.

"Binns, get up here on the double, plans just changed"

A couple of moments later a strong looking guy in urban camo ariake armor. The guy looked like he had his face slammed into a wall way too many times. His nose had visible scars that showed multible broken noses and the rest of his face was scarred but unnaturally flat. The only thing that really showed that he was alive were his eyes, blue and sparkling with mirth.

"What is it Shep? We need to start moving soon."

His voice sounded gravelly and felt like he was gargling marbles, sounded a bit like batman actually.

"Plan A is back on the table, we have a new pilot."

Shepards answer was simple. Binns only nodded with a slight smile and ran out the room, leaving me to confusedly stare at Shepard, expecting an answer to what the hell plan A was. She got back behind the desk and started playing around with a map on her omni M1.

After a couple of minutes of just standing around and staring at her I asked her.

"If you don't mind me asking ma'am, what is plan A?"

She just looked up to me and motioned me to come and look from above her shoulder. When I got there she showed me a map of what I realised was one of the northern parks of the city. Intel suggested the enemy had an outpost there and if any of us made it there then we were instructed to destroy the place if possible.

"That park houses an enemy FOB, it is the furthest outpost from any others and get this. They have a shuttlebay that, according to my scouts has multible shuttles in it at any time. Our original mission was to steal a shuttle, blow the base and transport a nuclear bomb to the fleet above and blow their command ship into dust. But we were met with complications, our pilot was killed when we originally infiltrated the city."

"How many hostiles are in there?"

"About fourty or so, atleast that is how many my scouts tell me they have seen. Could be up to one fifty. We just dont know."

"I mean no disrespect ma'am but isn´t going against so many hostiles in an entrenched position suicide. From what I´ve seen you have about 3 to four people under your command, that is not going to be enough."

Shepard just smiled at my scepticism.

"Theres fifteen of us, now sixteen with you, most are out scouting or scavenging but yes you are correct, making a direct assault or trying to infiltrate directly would be suicide. Look at the map."

I looked over the map and saw nothing new, just an enemy FOB, battle damage and some local flora. I shook my head.

"I don't see anything that could get us in ma'am"

"I don't blame you, took us a while to figure it out. See that big hole in the center of the encampment? That was from one of the rockets that our artillery crews fired when the initial assault on the city began. the rocket was largely ineffective but it did blast open a couple of water pipes. The pipes are empty of water and the water pumping station, whats left of it atleast, is just at the end of the street. From there we will bust the main pipe and eccolocate the pipe we need to down. When we get to the exit we will set charges around the base where ever possible and assault the shuttle bay. You will stay backnear the pipe until the charges are set. In this case you are the VIP. So keep your head down."

"I get it commander, here take this, you'll need this more than me"

I gave her the smg I had picked up from the dead asari two days ago. Has it really been two days already? She just smiled as she took it from my outstretched hand and put it to her hip where her armors mag clamps secured the weapon.

"Thanks, Oaks. You mind if I call you Oaks?"

"No ma'am, thats just peachy with me."

"Oh and Oaks, call me Jane. If thats all then you should go down and ask Taylor, the black guy always behind the weapon bench, for a new rifle because im not sure you can do much with just a pistol, alien or not."

Counting myself dismissed, I gave Shepard a quick salute and went down the stairs, just then noticing that the stairs were creaking like my old bed. Making it down the stairs and spotting the guy operating the perimiter motion sensors but no black guy behind a weapons crate. So my first instinct was to go and ask from him where this 'Taylor' guy was.

"Excuse me, where is this 'Taylor' guy?"

The guy flinched in his seat and he pulled out his handgun, more like a handcannon actually, all the while starting a combat roll behind cover. While I stood dumbfounded without moving he was behind cover and popped out, cannon blazing. I felt the bullet whizzing past my face, brushing through my hair and going past my skin by a millimeter. After the guy kept unloading on me, luckily missing each shot. When his gun clicked empty I realised his eyes were closed and when his eyes finally opened his eyes were full of shock. He dropped his gun and started apologising.

"Sorry dude, i'm so sorry, you really shouldn't sneak up on people like that."

I was still standing still as a rock from the shock of having a friendly unload on me like that, and from the suprise of living through that barrage. Even one of those rounds would have probably killed me. I was shaken out of my shock when I heard the stairs creak as someone came down it. I turned to look and saw Shepard coming down with two angular looking smg-s in her hands and pointing them towards us. She looked really pissed.

"Where is the enemy? Where are they coming from?"

Me and the guy who shot me just looked at eachother and he started to explain.

"Sorry commander, the new guy scared me, thats all. Almost killed him with ol' Hannah here."

As he was saying that he busied himself with reloading his handcannon so that he would not have to look shepard in the eyes.

Shepard just holstered her guns and facepalmed. "Jenkins, I dont know whether to be happy that you did not kill our new pilot just now or be ashamed that you missed all the shots from that distance."

Then she just turned around and went back up the stairs, leaving me and the newly introduced Jenkins to our own devices. There was an awkward silence in the air until Jenkins shrugged, turned around and sat back behind his console. I was starting to get irritated by this guy, he literally almost killed me and now he just started doing whatever he was doing before and didnt even give me an answer.

"Hey dude, where can I find Taylor or whatever the heck his name was?"

"He´s usually in the armoury."

I facepalmed because of that.

"And where is the armoury, I just got here, I dont even know where the blody latrine is."

Jenkins just raised his hand without looking away from the screen and pointed eastward.

"Go that way for 20 meters then on your right should be a green metal door that has its lock broken, behind that door is the armoury. Get it?"

Without uttering another word I set out to get to the armoury. I was surprised when I actually found the darn thing in five or so minutes because usually I have a terrible sense of distance.

When I stepped into the armoury I saw alot of ammo and some weapons, human and alien, but not a single spare suit of armor. So it did not take a genious why the black guy behind the desk was looking like cristmas came early when I walked in.

When I started talking with the guy the reason why he was so happy became even more evident, the guy was trying to con me out of my armor.

"Im not kidding, this suit is ancient, probably even older than me, I would be doing you a favour taking away the dead weight. How about I sweeten the deal even further, I'll add in five extra mags to your combat loadout."

I just shook my head at this guy. The armor had saved my life and I trusted its strenght and durability. There was just no way I would pretty much give it away, besides, Jane told me to get a weapon, not trade for it.

"For the last time mr Taylor, I am not giving away my armor for pretty much free, in fact I am not even trading. I am here because the commander wanted me to get an assault rifle so I could actually fight. So give me a gun and some ammo for it and I wont tell Shepard what a con-man he has for an armoury officer."

Fear poured into his eyes as he heard that I am not some random 'lone-wolf' coming to trade for some more supplies. That fear was pushed aside pretty quickly by him jumping into action, digging out a box from a pyramid of boxes. Out from it he took, I shit you not, an old rusting FAMAS assault rifle with some magazines that were in a similar state.

"Here, take these, It's not much but it'll do for now."

I stared at the gun, looked back at Taylor, then back at the gun, at Taylor. Doing that many more times I finally understood he was not joking. Seriously, a FAMAS might have been good back in the old days but now one would be lucky to down a single enemy with a whole squad firing at the bastard with the guns. Accuracy was shit, rate of fire was shit when compared to more modern guns, and the rounds had barely enough power to tickle a fully armoured human marine so an alien probably wont even feel a thing.

Disbelief still coursing through me, my hand went to the alien pistol still on my tight. I pulled the gun out and pointed it at the bastard. The look of shock on his face was very enjoyable. But it lasted for only a couple of seconds and turned into a full blown smile as he was not looking at me but past me. Thats when I felt the barrel of a gun pressing into the back of my head. I then spoke my mind about the situation.

"Well fuck."

A strong australian accenten female voice answered me.

"Indeed, now what is stopping me from putting a bullet in your head. Speak quickly and I might just let you survive."

Despite knowing that this could very well end with me having an extra hole in my skull, I smirked at Taylor.

"The gun in my hand is a spike head (turian) pistol, capable of tearing through your friend quite easily and my finger is allready on the trigger, if I die the round leaves the gun and our resident con-man has an extra hole in his body, something I guess you dont want."

The weird thing about turian pistols is that the gun does not fire its round until the finger has pulled back the trigger and let it push back into its original position, yeah, turians are weird.

"What makes you think I even care about him?"

"Oh, maybe the fact you were ready to shoot the guy who is going to be piloting the ship that is going to nuke the armada in orbit."

I felt the pistol slightly waver and took my chance. I whirled around, pushing away the gun from my head and left hooked the woman in the face, staggering her. I heard a noise behind me and jumped behind a box. When I peaked out I saw Taylor holding a shotgun while the woman was not still dazed like I expected her to be. I mean, i'm not weak or anything, I can arm wrestle among the best of them. She looked slightly pissed but motioned for Taylor to put away the gun. Then she walked to the shelf and took one of the alien rifles that was there and threw it at me. I stood up and caught the weapon and started going to the door, never turning my back to the duo. When I cleared the shop I could hear them arguing but didnt stay to listen to them.

Instead I asked a passing soldier where the sleeping quarters were and got directed to the underground sewer tunnels where most of the small base was located. the sewers had long ago stopped working so there was no weird smell and the occasional flood of melting snow had washed the pipes clean so they were perfect for a resistance group.

Finding a spot in the sleeping area, I arranged my stuff and laid down. I used my pack as my pillow and fell asleep almost instantly.


	6. Chapter 6

**AN** :Okay, this is crude work, who am I kidding, my work is always crude. My keyboard decided about half way through that the control scheme I had grown so used to in the last two years is wrong and changes should be made. So if some lettermarks are in the wrong place or are wrong or missing entirely then please keep in mind, its not my fault.

You know what guy, I would appreciate more reviews, I aint begging but I would love to get some feedback. Otherwise I feel like im just an asshole. An asshole that writes for no reason or no audience. I thank Golden Sheath for his support and reviews.

Also if anyone could explain to me how the beta system works and/or wants to beta the story should PM me, it would really help.

Thats it for this, by my standards, ridicculusly long authors note, enjoy the chapter.

CH5:

The first thing i felt after falling asleep was someones foot nudging my side.

"Wake up kiddo."

I groggily rose up an took my backpack from the ground. Looking at the person who woke me up and found myself surprised. Old man Zaeed Massani. The guy was a legend, said to have taken out more birds and bitches than the whole alliance marine core. Thing is, it actually might be true.

The sight of him made me straighten up and snap off a quick salute in a perfect parade stance. He saluted me back and sighed.

"You rookies are all the same, formalities upon formalities, if you salute to me out there I will personally kick your ass."

I stood down, not wanting to get my ass handed to me by the veteran. The man had been fighting since shanix and had participated in every major battle since so he had alot of experience.

"Follow me, we are moving out in ten. Shepard is taking some of our best to go ahead and plant the explosives. We are to follow and make it straight to the shuttle bay."

"What about the nuke?"

"Your looking at it boy."

Confusion must have been written plainly on my face because Zaeed just pointed at the rather large pack that he was hauling around.

"That is 15 megatons of atomic flame. Its portable and its safe. So dont get fidgety around me like I´m about to explode."

I just gawked at it, I knew we had nuclear weapons that were portable but I had no Idea they were that small.

During our conversation we had gotten out of the sewers and into line with the other men. I noticed that there were alot more than a couple dozen men who shepard had said she has under her command. As if reading my mind Zaeed answered my unasked question.

"Soldiers have been trickling in throughout the night. The remnants of the army mounted their own assault on some outpost yesterday and got crushed, now the survivors are coming here."

Looking at the assembled troops I saw different uniforms but one type stood out, those men were sticking together and were wearing an all dark grey BDU and they all had turian weapons. They represented almost a quarter of our total count and looked the most well equipped, most rested and most well trained bunch of soldiers we had. Again Zaeed saw where I was looking and answered my silent question.

"Shadow Company, Shepards unit. She infiltrated the city with them and they are the ones responcible for most of the duties around camp. They look like spec ops, walk like spec ops and talk like spec ops, but I dont like them."

I just nodded and looked towards Shepard, who was discussing something with one of his men. Then it hit me.

"Is she the sister of the Lion of Europa?"

Zaeed looked at me like I was stupid, I even felt stupid for not thinking about it sooner.

"Yes, that she is. I fought with her brother on Europa. It was a hellhole, but thanks tho her brother we turned a total victory for the enemy into a phyrric one. Damn I liked the kid, too bad his shuttle docked with the Everest, could use him down here."

The battle of Europa was the longest battle waged on a human colony. Mainly because the main human shipyards and marine training facilities were on the moon but also because Europa had an orbital defence net that kept destroying every assault wave targeting Earth or any of the inner solar system. But one day, mysteriously the guns went silent and a fleet jumped into orbit launching a massive ground invasion that was only rivaled by the ones sent at Mars, Luna and Earth herself. The human troops on the ground were fighting a losing battle and they could not retreat because the fleet in orbit was not letting the alliance fleet remmnants extract them. So John Shepard took the most experienced men he had available to him and mounted an assault on the controll room for the orbital guns. Once there he reactivated the orbital guns that caught the fleet by surprise. By the time the guns were silenced more than 90% of the alliance force was evacuated from Europa and either given to the running fleet or directed towards Earth.

"I should go, Shepard wants me on the preliminary assault team."

With that Zaeed walked away and made his way to shepard who was starting to have a pretty colourful group around him. With Shepards command we started marching towards the pump station.

In the middle of the night we did not have to be afraid of airstrikes nor being spotted from orbit. The birds were afraid to send out patrols during the night because few ever returned. So thanks to those factors we could move quickly and were in the pump station within minutes.

When we got into the structure we could see broken pumps and pipes along with the occasional skeleton or rotting corpse. We stopped at a big pipe labeled ´I-7´. Without ceremony or further words Shepards team went ahead and we settled into a long wait. The forward team was suppose to mark their path with glowing spray paint and they were supposed to signal us when they hit the infiltration point. Following that we were supposed to follow their marked path and start the assault when the booms hit.

Some of Shepards men looked fidgety while almost everyone else was having a meal which consisted of mostly MRE-s and some canned food someone had managed to scavenge from a bombed out building where he had to hide for a day from birds who had set up a temporary outpost right around the building.

When the signal hit we started traversing the pipe. The trek was quiet and unnoteworthy. We had most of our more heavily armoured guys up front while everybody else hung back. Shadow Company was at the end of the collumn beingthe rear guard.

After half an hour of trekking we finally made it to the collapsed part of it where we were supposed to get into the turian base. Counter signs were exchanged and I was pushed to the front of the line of men climbing up. Shepard was at the top with Zaeed, helping everyone up. As I started climbing and got ahold of Zaeeds arm, I noticed something weird. Sheoard was reatching her hand towards her pistol with a vacant look on her face. I was confused but didnt think anything about it. I should have known something was up from the look on her face but when she leveled her gun to the head of one of the men next to her.

 ***PHOW***

The man fell to the ground, everyone was so surprised that when she shot the next three soldiers next to her nobody could react.

 ***PHOW***  
 ***PHOW***  
 ***PHOW***

The last guy had just raised he shotgun when...  
 ***PHOW***

Her face exploded into brain matter and bone like everyone else. Zaeed was the first one to react out of the rest of us. He had his pistol in his left hand as he dropped me down and he rolled to his back, only to get a round into his face. his body fell down into the tunnel and landed on me. As most of us recovered from shock and started to point our guns at Shepard there was a roar of gunfire from our back lines. Shadow Company had opened up on us, cutting down many of us in the first seconds.

Grabbing Zaeeds body and dragging him into a small hole that had formed in the rubble. Pushing him into the hole to hide the nuke, I stood back up to see the hopeless situation. Loyalists falling like flies while the traitors pumped lead into them. Pulling out my pistol I started to unload on the bastards. One, two, three, four, five, six wait for the gun to cool down, repeat. The fighting lasted less than a minute after that. Shadow Company only sustaining light casualties while we were completely decimated. I myself took a round to the tigh, shoulder and chest. I was one of the last to go down and when I did, I purposefully directed my body to fall face first over the hole where I had hid Zaeed.

Over the next half hour the armor saved me many times as it was a spec ops model it did not give off heat. Every few minutes a yelp of pain followed a gunshot as Shepards men combed through the bodies and executed the oppossums. I was even turned on my back for a second where they checked me, but as I had a hole in my chest they did not make sure wether or not I was alive. When there had been more than ten minutes since the last death cry I overheard a conversation between Shepard and one of her men.

"Did you find it?"

"No ma'am we have combed through all the bodies. The bomb isn't here."

A thwack was amplified by the tunnel and I realised Shepard had hit her subordinate.

"What do you mean it isn't here, I shot the old coot myself. He should be here."

"We have looked through all the corpses. There is no sign of Massani nor the bomb."

Shepard roared in rage. "If we don't recover this bomb the whole operation will have been a failure and this betrayal will have been for nothing. The council will never accept this. The only way we will have peace is if the last atomic bomb is given over to them. Is that understood."

"Yes ma'am, understood ma'am."

I heard the soldier walking away. Then I remembered the owner of the voice. Jenkins, the not-completely-right-in-the-head kid who had shot at me back at base.

The Shadow Company men continued combing through the bodies for another ten minutes before they gave up and went above ground.

Only when I had waited another five minutes did I dare to move. I dragged myself over to a dead medic and fished out the magnets used to pull out the grain sized bullets. I pulled out the three slivers of metal and injected the small captules of medigel into my wounds. The agony that I felt as the grains were pulled out of the wounds was dampened by the anestetics in the miracle gel.

As I laid there in a pool of blood I heard the last thing I expected to hear. Breathing. Looking towards the source that to my shock was the hole where I had dumped Zaeed. Quickly scrambling over there I could see that Zaeed was indeed still breathing. The round had went through both his cheeks and the only thing that had prevented him from bleeding out was that Shepard had a heat mod installed on her pistol to tear through armor but the heated bullet mostly cauterised the wound and stopped the bloodflow. Digging through the deceased medics bad again, I pulled out the synth flesh canister and started patching up Zaeeds face.

When I was done with that I found something on Zaeeds hip that made me smile, the detonator linked to the explosives set up on the base. Looking over to the hole in the ceiling. I saw that the Shadow Company men had forgotten the rope ladder they used to get out of the hole. I smiled as I got a plan together.

Hauling up Zaeed, who was so full of painkillers that he couldnt even dream about making a noise and giving me away, I started moving towards the ladder when I felt an armoured gauntlet grab onto my foot. Looking down I could see it was a large man In heavy armor that had a small N7 sigil on his breastplate. I could see multible punctures in the armor but no blood leaking from them.

The man started getting up, slowly. Realising he was probably in alot of pain ,if the bullets didnt penetrate his skin he will still have huge bruises from absorbing that amount of kinetic energy.

"Thanks mate" he grunted as thanks for me helping him.

I started explaining to him the plan. When I was done just nodded and started climbing the ladder. When he was at the top I could see him peaking out and, after looking around for a few minutes, hauling himself out. i started climbing too but it took nearly three times as much time for me to get out of the hole because I was hauling Zaeed who was by no means a lightweight person. When I made it to the last steps of the ladder I felt my burden lightening and as I looked up I could see the other guy lifting Zaeed from my back.

When I got to the top I retook the burden that was named Zaeed and directed us towards the building the scouts had markedas the hangar. We made it there without incidents. After I had adjusted Zaeed so that I could make use of both of my hands and activating the mag clamps on my back to hold him still, I pulled out the rifle I had gotten from the small fight the day before and signaled the other man who had pulled out an oversized LMG with hiex rounds if i could judge from the lable on the box magazine under the gun.

He nodded back and punched the holographic lock, making it spin and dissapear. The door opened showing a well lit featureless gray room that was about 8 meters tall and 30 or so meters from one end to the other with half a dozen shuttles and a couple of turian mechanics with a single asari. All of them went down with a single burst of my partners machine gun because they were all around the same table drinking some liquid and chatting with eachother. What was left of them confirmed my suspicions about them being hiex rounds.

We bolted towards the row of shuttles and took the one with the best engine to hull size ratio. Before I stepped into the cockpit I set Zaeed down on the bench and strapped him down. Reaching to my hip I plucked the detonator and handed it to my fellow survivor and we nodded to eachother. I ran over to the pilots cabin and strapped myself in. It took me a few moments to figure out how to turn on the interface for the shuttle and start the startup procedure. The shuttle looked to be a newer model than the one I had had a glimpse of before so I took a quick peak around the controls, finding a fair few differences from the older one.

When the bootup procedure hit 80% I heard a rapid pinging noise and as I switched to the exterior cameras I saw Shepard herself along with a mixed squad of shadow company, asari and turians. They were aiming towards the cockpit and engines, trying to force us to open our door to shoot back.

"Don't open the door, thats exactly what they want. Their small arms fire cant do much to our armor."

The only answer I got was a grunt and the sound of an armoured form sitting back on a seat.

When the readout read 100% I started up the engine and rose about a meter above ground, only to dodge to the side with the shuttle and impact against the wall. I struggled to stabilise the shuttle and called back to the crew compartment.

"Sorry, the controls are a bit unfamiliar."

Getting no verbal answer, not that I expected one, I found the button making the craft go forward and pressed it. The craft lurched forward so suddenly that I heard how my passengers got thrown around in the back. But my mind had no room about worrying about them because while the city was a ruin some of the skyscrapers were still either standing or were propped up against each other, and I was headed straight towards a cluster of them.

"Oh shit, oh shit."

I was scared shitless, trapped in a speeding shuttle, that I could barely controll, headed towards buildings designed to take orbital bombardment at full speed. I would like to see someone else stay cool in that kind of situation. I really did not like the holographic controlls, made things alot more confusing.

"Why do these idiots not have a backup system or anything..."

As soon as backup left my mouth, a panel opened up and out came a joystick that looked like one used in most human fighter and shuttle class ships.

"Backup systems engaged."

That bodyless voice made me jump, I thought I was alone in the cockpit but then again the voice sounded robotic.

'A VI, sweet.'

I hadnt seen or heard of/from a VI since the battle of the blue mountains, back when humans could still claim ownership for over three fourths of the planet. The VI there was operating a refueling and rearming station on hellhole hill.

Not having much time, I grabbed the control stick upon whitch the hologram cleared and showed me a clear view of what was going on outside. There was maybe 100-300 meters left until the first skyscraper. Yanking the stick to the left I passed by it only to have to pull it back to go up and thread the needle between two fallen skyscrapers. The shuttle went through a half collapsed floor, dodging support pillars and trying to not scrape against the ceiling or floor. I maybe had a couple of centimeters between the ceiling and the shuttle maybe even less between the floor and the shuttle. So when I flew out the building I breathed a sigh of relief and almost didnt see the next building. Pulling the stick back as fast as possible, I managed to pull the craft into a 90 degree ascent into the sky. I could feel the slight bumps as the vessel scraped against the outer shell of the skyscraper, well, what was left of it anyway.

Clearing the skyscraper, I could finally level out to a more reasonable vector and begin heading up into orbit. i heard the other survivor coming up to the cockpit. It was hard not to, with his heavy armor and all. So when the door opened, I was not exactly surprised. What I was surprised about was the detonator that got passed to me and the deep voice speaking to me.

"You can do the honors."

I took the detonator and summoned up the rear view.

"Say goodbye, chicken brains"

Then i clicked the button and saw how every building aside from the hanger get turned into a big fireball. Me and the other guy enjoyed the view for a couple of seconds until he broke the peace.

"Seriously? Chicken brains? Even I could have done better than that."

I just gave him a glare and focused back on the controls. The next ten minutes was spent in relative silence with me holding the shuttle steady when exiting atmo. Almost as soon as when we had cleared the atmosphere I saw a flashing purple light. Interested in what it meant, I clicked it and had a big text thrown over the screen.

'Thruster 3 offline'

"Oh shit" was my only reaction to that.

"Whats wrong? What does it say?"

I just looked over to the other guy like he was an idiot, the text was right infront of me, if I could read it, he could too. Then i remembered that the did not have a turian omnitool.

"We lost one of our thrusters, luckily we are allready out of atmo, so we ar not going to fall to death."

Before he could answer another button came alive, this time a bluish green one. Out of curiosity, I clicked it too, who knew, maybe it would fix the thruster.

Instead of that happening I heard a flanged voice, a turian voice, come from the speaker.

"Shuttle Imeri-Hesh-Luxor two-seven, we have reports that you have lost your starboard engine, report."

Before the other guy could say anything I selected a voice distortion programm I had on the omnitool and answered.

"This is two-seven, our engine is shot, humans attacked our outpost and blew it up, we have wounded aboard, multible in critical condition, request permission to land on the nearest frigate."

Frigates were almost always equipped with a top of the line medical facility and used as medevac vessels because of their size, speed and noncritical role in combat. So I basically prayed the turians had the same doctorine concerning their wounded as the alliance so we could get landing clearance and not fight half the ship after landing.

"Roger that two-seven, you have clearance to land on the _**Ruthless**_ , good luck two-seven."

"Much oblidged."

Instead of having a team of heavily armed and armoured marines greeting us, we would now have some shipboard medics greeting us. If we were lucky we might get another shuttle and get out before we were shot down.

Heading towards the nav point I felt the N7 put his hand on my shoulder.

"You sure about this? there are going to be alot of them on that ship."

His voice sounded a bit uncertain, and that had me worried, N7 were afraid of nothing, so worrying one was a feat.

" We are not going to be taking the ship, we take another shuttle and get out of here before they can mobilize. They will probably only have medics and techs waiting for us, we shold be able to make quick work of them."

While I was talking with him my hands went through the menu, setting us up for a landing on the ship. It would not be a soft one but hopefully that would be written off because we were essentially limping to the hangar.

His hand left my shoulder and he went to the back, probably to set up the machinegun on his back and setting himself into the crash webbing. Guiding the last approach towards the hanger I saw one very big problem, there were no other shuttles in the hanger. Throwing that out of my mind, I focused on having us land in one piece. The hangar got bigger and bigger as we got closer to it, I could see a couple of turians running around, moving gear and just moving about. 500 meters... 400 meters...300 meters... 200 meters... 100 meters... 50 meters... 20 meters... 5 meters... and we were in. The second starboard thruster gave out as we got through the mass effect field protecting the hangar. With our second thruster gone, the shuttle span out of control and impacted the ground. We slid from one end of the hangar to the other, almost impacting the elevator. Both of us were in crash webbing so it wasnt too bad for us and we could get out fast without being disoriented, the same could not be said about the turians, they were probably expecting a smoother landing because most of the receiving party was either crushed by the now useless piece of metal called a shuttle or was just laying on the ground, unconcious from the loud and unpleasant sound of metal grinding on metal.

"Bad news, we dont have any shuttles, so we have to try and take the ship."

"Hells yeah, now I can add taking a starship almost by myself to the crazy shit I have done"

Ijust shook my head and started unbuckling my safety harness

We were out in seconds, I took a bit longer so when I was out the N7 was allready at the elevator, waiting for it to come down while executing the turians on the ground unconcious. I knew it was not very chivalrious to kill the enemy while they are down and out but the rulebook on chivalry flew out the window when the turians started orbitally bombarding every fortress they came across that did not have anti ship cannons.

Luckily the alarm hadnt been sounded yet so we were still in the clear and the elevator came in surprisingly fast. Having a turian in light, form-fitting, white uniform with minimal armor plating in the most critical locations. He could only open his mandibles in surprise before I shot him with my rifle, putting him down for good. We rushed into the elevator, I pushed the buttons that my omnitool told me were engineering and CIC.

"I will go to engineering, preventing them from manually blowing us up or spacing us. You will take the combat information center, cutting off their head, once I am done here we will go to the crew quarters and meet up there, eliminating any spark of resistance before it can start a flame and burn us. Good luck."

The N7 just nodded and I was left surprised that he was subservient to me, N7 were notoriously independant and dominating in EVERY situation. I should know, my girlfriend was an N7, and let me tell you, she didnt take any shit.

When the elevator reached the engineering level, I rushed out and rammed the stock of my rifle into the face of another surprised turian. Knowing that the longer I stayed silent, The closer I would get to the damage control station and main engineering without alerting anyone, so without doubt I pulled out my knife and showed it into the turians throat.

After I pulled it out I ran silently towards where the sign said damage control. Damage control is a very important station on a ship. It can cut off power, vent certain sections of air, overload conduits and stop transport between levels by shutting down elevators and hatches. I could not vent the air because the ship only had so much and I could not just skim through Earths atmosphere and collect more, I would be shot down before I cleared the stratosphere. I couldnt cut power or overload the conduits because getting power online again would take time and blowing up conduits would damage the ship. So i was just going to have to take control of the elevator and seal the hatches. I ran through my first door, giving the shocked and sleepy guard there the same treatment I gave his buddy infront of the elevator. That was where the corridor went into two, one route, the DC route went down below the walkway and the engineering forward behind what looked like a thick blast door. Deciding that if the engineers could permanently close the blast doors there would be no getting to them, so I went there instead of the DC.

Just as I got to the door activation switch I heard gunfire from above. I started counting down from two minutes in my head. That is how long a normal soldier takes to get completely organized during an unexpected attack or ambush. I kicked the activator and saw a dozen or so confused looking turians milling around the floor, either standing behind their consoles or sitting and talking. There were only four armed guards.

I sprayed the unarmoured technicians first with the rifle, killing most and wounding the rest. As my rifle was not the greatest thing against armoured and shielded turians, I used my rifle as a club to knock one of the bewildered guards over the railing and into the moving machinery below, throwing the rifle at a guard out of my reach and making him block it I pulled out my mass effect using sidearms and concertrated on the guard whose rifle was unfolding in his hands. With three shots his shields popped and I put a shot through his visor, making him fall to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Next I concentrated on the one that had pulled uot a shotgun and was starting to raise it. Realising I could not do much against him before he splattered me over the wall, I jumped at him, pistol whiping his surprised face as he finally got his shotgun up but could not pull the trigger because I had dazed him and now had a pistol inside his shields, I pulled the trigger before he could recover andhe fell into a heap. Before I could turn to face the last guard I heard the noise of an omniblade activating, years of combat experience fighting against bastards just like this kicked in. I heard him running towards me, hoping to impale me in one go. Needless to say I was not going to make it easy by just standing still. I jumped aside and watched the man run past me, quickly stopping and turning around again, only to see me with a tool crate in hand. I smiled at his puzzled expression and threw it at him. While human bullets were fast enough to be picked up by the turian shield sensors, the tool crate wasnt. Rumor was that at the beginning of the war, human bullets were too slow too but then the turians tweaked the shields to stop them. The result was that the turian had a face full of tools while I was free to run at him and run his face through with my knife.

I didnt have time to spare so I couldnt even pick up the rifle I threw earlier, the DC room had to be taken fast, I had allready wasted almost a minute with the engine room. So I ran out with both my pistols drawn, went down the stairs and busted into the DC room to find... noone. The room was totally empty, I scanned the room and went further in. I was just lowering my guard, concluding that there was truly nobody there when a body slammed into me from up above.

'Stupid, I forgot to check the ceiling.'

The thing about turians is that they weigh alot more than a human, although they are aproximately the same size their natural armor plating weighs just that much. But although their mass is much greater and thanks to that the muscle mass is also larger by a fraction their mass holds them back, they are not as flexible as humans and they can not bring all their strenght to bear as easily as a human can. So while the turian was on my back and was beating me with its talons I was trying to get a handhold of him. After a few seconds I finally got ahold of the attackers leg and swung him off me. he flew against the wall, hard, collapsing bonelessly against it. I got ready to execute... her. Yes she looked slimmer and shorter than normal turians you can see in the field, also she had a smaller head fringe than normal ones and her weird back knee things were smaller. She looked young. On most turians you could tell from the face, the facepaint and the damage and wear and tear on their carcapace roughly told their age. Her facepaint looked pretty fresh and she did not show any noticable signs of age on her face.

I just cursed my heart and pulled her up and hauled her out of the DC room and bound her to a railing on the stairs with omnigel from my omnitool, remembering to take hers away before doing that. After that was done I ran back to DC and found the security options and selected manual override for all hatches, magnetically locking them. Nobody was getting through those without blowing the ship up.

I was on the last 20 seconds of the two minutes I gave myself and the gunfire up top was continuing, proving to me that the N7 was still kicking ass and taking names upstairs. Holding up to my end of the plan, I ran back to the elevator and called it to engineering. After waiting for another ten seconds and going over my mental timer and knowing that now we would be facing much fiercer resistance.

The elevator finally arrived and I stepped in and selected the crew deck. The ride took another twenty seconds, an atrocious amount of time for a ship this small, before I got to the crew deck only to see total slaughter going on. The N7 was blazing through turians in their sleepwear and some half armoured ones, all of them carrying weapons but the N7 didnt give a damn. He was just running and gunning around, his machinegun in one hand and something that looked like a turian equivalent of a machinegun in the other, cutting them down faster than I could count. Allready the floor was covered in corpses and none of them even had their shields activated. Then realization struck me.

'We must have hit them during the end of their sleep cycle when the guards are groggy and the ones that are suppose to replace them are still rubbing sleep from their eyes. Knowing that I would only get in his way in here I reactivated the elevator and rode up to the CIC level. Only to find the same sort of devastation there, bodies everywhere, what looked like the captain, slumped over a console overlooking the galaxy map. Running to the pilots chair in the nose of the ship, I took the controls.

While I had been trained in relay jumps incase i had to ever make a jump with a shuttle, I didnt know the mass of this ship, nor was I rated to fly anything bigger than a corvette. But still, I took the controlls, They looked somewhat logical when compared to a corvette setup. A frigate is an oversized corvette so their systems had to be similar.

Dancing my hands over the hologram in a now more practiced manner, the shuttle had been great for quick learning, I turned the ship over towards the relay and the fuel depo near it. I had barely started moving towards it when I received a hail, it was from the command ship, the dreadnaught now identified on my system map as the _**THV Particular Justice**_. Of course I answered it, it was either certain death by a dreadnaught shot in the ass or a chance of bullshitting my way out of trouble.

 _ **"THV Ruthless**_ state your reason of leaving formation or be fired upon for desertion"

I quickly racked my brain for an explanation and decided to keep playing the crashed shuttle card.

"Sir, this is helmsman Gaullius, the captain and XO are in critical condition, they went to oversee the shuttle landing when their second starboard thruster gave out and they got hit by debri from the thruster. We are taking them to the nearest medical facility."

As I finished that sentence I finally got out of the Earths gravity well that was holding me from going into FTL, and also getting out of the turian fleets secondary gun range, to hit us they now have to turn around and take aim with their spinal cannon, whitch will take time, considering dreadnaughts move slower than snails.

 _ **"THV Ruthless,**_ turn back, the mercy ship _**Galladan**_ has the necessary facilities needed to treat the worst of injuries."

After that I gave up bullshitting, given that I did'nt need to anymore.

"Yo ho and a bottle of rumm maties."

With that I engaged the ftl drive and sent us rocketing away towards the Charon relay. Searching through the ships data files for anything interesting or otherwise useful I found the ships cargo log and the ship schematics.

I heard the gunshots stop below and I quickly pulled up the files and calculated the mass of the ship, added the cargo weight and the extra shuttle to find out the mass of the ship so that I could make the mass relay jump to arcturus. When I got done with that i heard the elevator opening. Pulling out both my pistols, incase the turians won the battle in the crew deck, I turned around and, to my immense relief, saw the N7 walk through the doors. his armor dented in multible places and covered in blue blood so the original coat of paint was barely even seen.

"Where the fuck were you, I thought we were suppose to take the crew deck together!?"

"Chill man. i'm sorry for that but it seemed like you had it covered and I thought that i should get up here and get us away from the fleet before someone gets smart and flags us for demolition."

"Suppose you´r right but next time we have a change of plans, com me."

"I would have done that if you had given me your com, not that I blame you, we had plenty of other stuff to do than exchanging contact information. Hell I dont even know your name."

"Mason, names Mason. Yours?"

"Valmar, Valmar Oakfield, flight lietenant. Oaks or Val if you want to be informal."

With that we both turned towards the window to look at the mass relay that was growing larger by the second. After enjoying that silent moment of camradery Mason turned around and started walking down the stairs that led to the pilots chair.

"As much as I would like to enjoy the moment, I think we need to pull your friend out of the wreckage and get him to the med bay here."

before he could walk out I had an idea and pulled off the translucient wires the turian pilot had on him. Opened it and started looking for a program to change the turian language to human. Thanks to my omnitool I could read the turian text using an autotranslate program that translates any known language on a picture to any other known language, whitch in this case was labeled human. Silly aliens, humanity had multible main languages so their translator program was a mess so learning spanish and mandarin in school as a hobby really paid off. Finally I found the settings tab and changed the language from turian to human.

"Wait a sec, I think you could use this to activate automatic medical procedures in the med bay. Do you hapen to have a file on english to turian on your omni?"

Mason looked at me like I had just grown another head and then just shrugged.

"Sure, let me send it to you. What is your adress?"

Mentally slapping myself for not checking it before I opened up my mail info and got it and physically facepalmed myself.

"Its cloaca8609"

I could see mason trying, and failing to stifle a laugh at that. It seems even aliens cant help but use sex related names for their accounts.

"Copy, sending the files now."

As soon as he pressed the last button on his omni I got a message that had a singular file attached. I opened the file, confirmed the contents and patched it into the language files of the omni tool, then copying the work and placing it in the dead pilots omni and tossing the wires to Mason.

" Here ya go, that should have the capability to interface with the ships systems. Now go get Zaeed."

He just caught the wires, attached them to his arm and nodded. Striding towards the elevator.

After he was gone I could focus my full attention on the relay ahead of me. The ship was allready within the green zone and all it took from me was to input the ship mass into the jump computer and the computer did the rest for me, giving me a file at the end. The file was sent to the relay along with my destination code and vector. After that it was a fast ten second ride alongside the relay and we were on our way to the arcturus system.


	7. Chapter 7

23.12.2015: Okay guys, I forgot to add in some lines that are necessarry for the next chapter to work so I modified the chapter to include them. The newer things are just before and during the fight scene.

An internet cookie to whoever finds the RvB refferences.

Ch6:

The trip through the relay did not take long, just a few minutes and it was over. The instruments that had been silent during the relay jump started to blare beep and whatever the heck it is between them.

The cacophony of noise woke me up. And that is saying something about the noise level. After the calculations for the jump were done, I had just nodded off. Coming down from an adrenaline high is something that can make one feel like he is a puppet whose strings were cut. Usually it is nigh impossible to wake someone up from that kind of deep sleep. So as I groggily opened my eyes and saw the LADAR screen it was enough to shock me into instant readiness.

The screen was filled with hundreds of bluish green dots. They were of different sizes and classes but one thing was certain, if they had allready gotten word ofour status as a captured vessel, then we would be lucky if at the end of the engagement we had a piece of the ship that was bigger than a trash can. Forcing myself to stay at full alert, I began to head over to the arcturus relay, not too fast but not too slow. Only after that noticing that the drift was terrible. A whole 40k units. thats what you get for putting a shuttle pilot in the helm of a heavy frigate that measures almost 300 meters. Also the slight warping of the hull in some places was something that usually was avoided by frigate helmsmen but somehow I succeeded in almost shearing off my port wing.

As the minutes ticked by I was beginning to get my hopes up. They had not shot at me yet and nothing had gone wrong yet. The ship had done several small in system jumps, passing by the ruins of arcturus station where a couple of frozen corpses had bounced off my front window. I had either not been detected or the fleet guarding the system just didn't care. As i was punching in the coordinates for the final jump towards the relay my fears were realised as the button I now knew symboled comms beeped, signaling that I had someone trying to contact me. With reluctance i opened the link, knowing that if I didn't answer at all it would raise even more suspicion.

"This is Aethius system control, transmit your clearance codes."

I was between two emotions: anger and fear. Fear because I did not know the clearance codes and searching for them in the ships systems would take too long. Anger because the bastards were trying to wipe us from history. They were changing the names of human systems, planets and all now that I saw the names of the planets on the system map.

Nevertheless, I had to think of an answer soon, no codes meant that the ship I was piloting would have a lot more holes in a few minutes. But where could i get them from? Thats when an idea hit me, it wasnt perfect, but if I could pull it off then they should give me every existing award for acting there is. So I played the transmit button down and checking what they called the Sol system and Earth.

"HEL-zzzzzzz-multible fires in-zzzzzz-argo and bridge sect-zzzzzzzz- wounded on board, I-zzz-peat multible woun-zzzzz- board. The fleet is und-zzz-ttack. Human dreadn-zzzzz- group has tak-zzzz- orbit -zzzzz- Karben -zzz- Dirthum has -zzzzz- lost."

Nothing happened for a couple of seconds. So fearing that I wasn't convincing enough, I prayed that Mason and Zaeed were out of the cargo bay and overrid the cargo bay doors along with the containment field, letting all the air and loose stuff in the bay to fly out. The sensors should think of them as debri and the bodies among the debri should only make it more convincing.

That got them moving because in another ten or so seconds of waiting I got another com signal to my ship.

"Copy that _THS Ruthless ,_ Battlefleet Aethius Will reinforce Battlefleet Dirthum. I am get yourself to the nearest shipyard and get that damage repaired. _ARS Millennium_ over and out."

With a disbelieving stare I watched the majority of the asari fleet jump into FTL. Just with a few words I had freed the mass relay for free transit. The arcturus relay was a prime relay. That meant that it led to multible other relays whitch led to multible systems themselves. So by the time the asari understood what was going on and turned back, I could be virtually anywhere in the known, or unknown, galaxy. Browsing the maps I selected the system whitch by my memory was called the Exodus cluster.

The jump was again over in minutes depositing us in a system that was, thankfully, clear of green dots. There were a couple of gray ones but that was it. I set up autopilot towards the next relay, hoping to reach the next system without using ftl because that burned through my fuel supplies like a machinegun eats through rounds. We could not dock at any refueling stations in the vicinity either, the sight of a lone turian frigate might make people suspicious. That means i could not refuel or resupply before reaching the terminus systems, the area of the map displayed in redish brown. Which I hoped means hostile or territory where the turians are not welcome.

So without further ado I set the system to wake me if any 'friendly´ contacts dropped in system or if we had reached the relay and relaxed into the comfortable chair, falling asleep almost instantly.

 _I stood amids the destroyed ruins of a guard post. As I looked around I saw a man crawling out from a flipped humvee. His legs were blody and I could see a piece of shrapnel sticking out of his back. He was a goner, I knew it and he knew it. I stood up to maybe soothe his pains, nobody deserved to die alone, so maybe I could make his passing easier. I dashed over to him and tried to place my on his shoulder, to show him he was not alone, I tried to speak. Both attempts failed, first my hand went through him and second my voice never came out._

 _I was shocked, so I quickly turned around to where I was slumped at, only to find another man laying there. Me. Then it all came back to me, the day I cursed every day. So I could only numbly watch as the man crawling from the wrechage tried to make it to me. I squeezed my eyes shut. Not willing to see the event take place. So instead of seeing it, I heard three pairs of feet run towards me. A stronger thud, signaling that they had vaulted over the roadblock, atleast what was left of it. I heard them shuffling around, securing a perimeter, making sure there was noone here. I heard them chuckling, speaking in their language. The hiss of an omniblade activating and the swear words of the marine who was on the ground, the man who was suppose to drive me to the airfield._

 _We had been driving like crazy, probably breaking all the records, and speed limits, that anyone ever had set. the soldier had driven like a god, dodging and weaving through other troop transports, tanks and fleeing civillians. We had just made it through the outer security station when the enemy hit us. Fighters, bombers, shuttles, You name it, they had it all coming at us. One of the enemy fighers was shot down right above us, we cheered, but the pilot of that fighter would not go down without doing some damage. All of a sudden all the missiles and guns on the ship fired all at once. the missiles hit the security station, turning the reinforced concrete and metal bunker into nothing more than pieces of scrap and stones. The volley of mass accelerated rounds went through the convoy, leaving behind a line of ruined vehicles and dead bodies, most were civillians trying to make it to the spaceport and board ships that will take them to other strongholds or attempt to run the blockade. My driver had been good enough to dodge the first volley, but the sudden turn flipped the car, throwing me out of the opened side door and at the wall, I blacked out and came to to the driver crawling. I knew what happened next, the turians would execute the man for wearing marine garb, they hated the marines more than almost any other branch of the alliance military, except maybe the space navy because those guys were still running around and destroying their colonies somewhere if the random comms that our stealth sattelites sometimes caught were true. I could not do a thing, I was still dazed from the impact and from waking up_ _. i backed up in horror at what I knew to be my beheaded companion._

 _After_ _taking a couple of steps backwards from_ _the execution I heard a warcry, a human one. I saw a lone woman in heavy armor but armoured with only a huge sledgehammer rush the turians, taking them by surprise. The first turian got his face pulverised by the strenght of the hit, the second one managed to get his rifle up but got an armoured boot into his crotch, doubling him over while the third, with the omniblade charged her. The two fought like demons, not limiting themselves with weapons but also using their hands, legs and faces. She spit into his face after another dodge, stunning him for a second. But the second was all that was needed. She kicked her opponent in the chest, pushing him away and then swinging her hammer into the turians midsection so that he crumpled to the ground, breaths rasping from his mandibled mouth. As she went to finish the turian off, I saw the turian she had kicked in the crotch regain control of himself and raise his pistol. I tried to call out to her, warn her, do still, a shot rang out, followed by another, and another, and another. Her chest exploded, the momentum she had built up for the finishing swing and the velocity of the shots turned her around and I finally saw her face, Sophie. The N7 marking on her chest completely visible, the heart I had drawn on it during the early stages of our relationship was blown in half. The worst part was that I was parallised, I would have gladly fought alongside her, or atleast kill the bastard that had offed the only person I had left. Mom and dad died with the fleet defending earth, both my brother died on Europa when their shuttle got blown to smithereens right next to mine, they always said that twins would go out together, and my baby sister died when our home got bombarded by the ships in orbit._

 _I could only look on in shock as the bastard holstered his heavy pistol and started beating the corpse of my girlfriend, yelling in rage as the turian on the ground died a slow death of choking on his own blooad and having his lung collapsed by a sledgehammer. After a minute or so, I could feel my hand moving, I had regained control over my body and drew my sidearm. The bastard was still beating my girlfriends corpse but he must have seen me in his peripheral view cause he started turning towards me, everything slowed down. My gun was in my hand that was surprisingly steady. The turian had a look of shock on his face, mandibles hanging open. I squeezerd the trigger on my pistol, and held it down. The automatic pistol in my hand made a loud continuous roar and the ammo counter displayed on the back of it went down rapidly. The first 20 bullets did nothing, falling down as his shield stopped them. The 21-st bullet broke the shields and the next three punctured him in different spots. One in the crotch, one in the chest and the final one in his throat. The turian fell to the ground, clutching his throat as he choked on his own blood._

 _I could remember all that happening, so when I heard the roar I was not surprised, I opened my eyes, the fight went exactly the same way it did in my memories. Sophie died, I killed his killer and as all that went on, I just stood there, knowing that I could have saved her, if I had just acted, if I had just came out of shock sooner, I could have shot the bastard, or atleast warned her. But no, I didn't and now she is dead, under a small pile of stones i had laid over her body after closing her eyes. I still had her dogtags linked to mine and I still sometimes grabbed onto them and just cried, remembering my biggest failure. My biggest regret._

 _ **Growl...Growl**_

 _I looked around in my ghost form, I didn't remember anything that loud or happening back then. Usually it was just screams, explosions and gunfire. But there was nothing here. Then I turned around and saw that what had before been a road full of dead bodies and broken vehicles was now pure darkness. I paniced, turning around again and again, only to find that everything around me had turned into emptiness aswell, even the spot of asphalt I stood on before was now nothing more than darkness given form. Suddenly i was falling, and falling, and falling. Just when I started to lose hope of ever being able to stop the fall when all of a sudden I just...stopped._

The next thing I know is that color had returned to my world. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. Throwing a look at the instruments I understood that we were nearing the secondary relay in the cluster. In preparation I got the calculations ready and canceled the alarm I had set up but rerouted the program to ping my omnitool if the computer detected any 'friendly' IFF beacons.

Looking at the map again and seeing that we had another 20 or so minutes till we had to transmit the jump info I set up another program to transmit them when the correct condition were met and decided to head down to the mess and take a quick bite to eat, essentially leaving the ship on auto pilot.

Once I got into the elevator, of course after the mandatory kick to a dead turian, and after making a face from the smell the dead turians were making. Most of them probably shat themselves when Mason came through the elevator doors, minigun in hand and all.

After selecting the crew deck and settling in for a wait I finally noticed that Turian elevators were slower than human ones. Weird, the turians were decades, if not centuries ahead of us in everything but humans still held two advantages, sheer stubborness and fast elevators. Yeah right.

When the elevator made it to the crew deck I started going towards the counter where I hypothesized the food was kept when I saw Mason sitting down behind a table and eating from a sealed package with a straw while reading from his omnitool. He even still had his helmet on.

"Mason. Are you really eating from inside your helmet?"

"Yeah, my old CO told me that the helmet i have just passed food absorption beta before all production was halted due to the facility being bombarded."

I just looked at him like he was stupid.

"And you believed him, huh, I guess your CO must have quite a mischievous streak in him."

Now it was Masons turn to look at me. Somehow I knew he had a deadpan look on his face.

"Who said it was a he?"

Yup definetly a deadpan.

"Nevermind, you actually got anything solid to eat?"

he pulled out two packets from one of the pouches on his chestplate and two bottles from anothyer one. Weighing them in his hand for a second before throwing one pair at me, waiting for me to catch it before throwing the second ones. I thought that the second pair was for him so that we might share a meal, so that confused me.

"Whats with the second pack and drink? I doubt I'll even finish the first one off by myself."

"Oh that one is for the turian cuffed down below. We might be able to get some info out of her so we better make sure she doesn't starve or dehydrate."

I turned around, dissapointed that I would not get to know my crewmate better, we were the only humans for probably millions or billions of kilometers. Deciding to sate my curiosity, I asked.

"What are you reading?"

"Oh just reading the speeches of general Church , great pieces, he should have become a poet, not a general."

Sensing that the conversation was over, I went to the slow elevator to get back down to engineering. Just then noting that all the bodies were gone from the crew deck. Shrugging the question away and selecting the engineering deck I had to bear the horrible elevator music. Seriously? What kind of sick fuck would do something like that? This is psycological warfare at its worst. I bet there are accords made up against using terrible elevator music in an elevator that moves as slow as a snail with a broken leg.

Finally the elevator stopped and I stepped out, only to have some small dust particle or some other flying trash fly into my eye and making me swear. I quickly rubbed my eye, feeling the tears from my eyes reaction to the foreign body flow to my cheek. I wiped them away and started blinking as fast as humanly possible, trying to get the trash out of my eye. Finaly getting the particle out I could finally concentrate on my surroundings. The first thing that graceb my eyes was the lack of bodies lying around, so that meants that the bodies had been cleared out from here aswell. From the corner of my eye I could see a pile of bodies down in the cargo bay. Atleast that is one question answered. I made my way to damage control and saw the turian still chained to the railing. She was awake. How did I know? The death glare that could destroy planets gave me quite a good idea. Sitting down next to her I pulled out the pack and threw it onto her lap. Then mustering all my inner menace I put it into a single sentence.

"Eat up, you are going to need it."

She just motioned for her cuffs. Probably expecting me to open them for her. I turned the cuffs into liquid for a moment, long enough for her to pull her hands away from the railing and resolidified them. She made a frustrated sound at that and glared at me. I just chuckled and took out my own ration bar, leaving her to eat with the cuffs on.

I took a few bites out of the weird bluish bar that was in my packet and noticed how focused she was on my face. At just that moment a tear came from my eye, probably a late reaction to the irritant that was there before. As I wiped the tear away and accidentally covered my good eye with my arm I heard the sound of footsteps. Sensing trouble I tensed up, and in time too, for the next thing that happened was that her ration came flying at me, hitting me in the face and disorienting me for a second. That gave her enough time to shouldercharge me into my stomach, knocking the wind out of me but cracking her exterior armor on my heavyer one. She followed up with a quick uppercut into my exposed chin, making me lift up, off the floor a couple of centimeters and disorienting me even further. At that point I was breathless and saw only stars so i could do nothing when she climbed on my back and started choking me with her cuffs. With my lungs completely empty and her on my back using her whole considerable weight to choke me, asphyxiation was quick to set in. Using my last strenght to ram myself into the wall with her between me and the wall, i finally got a brief gasp of air into my lungs before she started choking me again. With somewhat renewed strenght and with the ability to think clearly I rammed her against the railing and activated my omnitool, opening the last app and reliquifying the cuffs, making her fall down the staircase and land on her back.

Any normal person or alien would be winded but she just jumped up and pulled a gun out, my gun. Instinctivly going to the holsters on my hips, I found that one of my pistols was indeed gone, leaving me with the other one. By the time I realised that the gun was missing, bullets were pinging against my shields, draining them rapidly. I jumped to cover while pulling out my pistol. As soon as I went to cover the shots ceased and the door that led to the DC was opened. What the hell would she want from there, the place is a dead end? Then realisation struck me, she could vent all the air or blow up the ship from there. So I rushed the room, jumping over the railing, only to find the door having a red hologram signifying that it was locked.

"GODDAMNIT"

Then I remembered that the soldiers that I killed at engineering had grenades on them, grenades that I could use to blow up the door. So I took off towards the main engineering section. While I was doing that I opened a comm with Mason, to warn him.

"Mason, do you hear me?"

"Whats up LT?"

"Listen to me. Find your helmet and get the bomb, once you have done that you need to get to the bay and find us a shuttle, prep it and wait for me or go if I dont show in time."

He still sounded relaxed, slightly worried but still relaxed.

"Just do it, you can judge me later. This ship might go up in flames soon."

"On it."

I could hear him pressurising his helmet through the link as I made it to the soldier and jumped down to take his grenade bandolier. After I got the bandolier i got back up and ran back towards DC as fast as possible. Then I started to hear hissing throughout the ship. The turian was not venting the atmo but sucking it into tanks distributed throughout the ship. The measure is usually used for testing atmospheric seals before leaving atmo. But this means that she does not want to kill us. If she did, she would just override the blast doors and airlocks nearest to us and send us tumbling out of the ship with alot of air and equipment.

"Im in the elevator, heading down to the hangar"

"Rodg, engage mag boots, the air is being vented and she could disengage the gravity and deem you as a good target for a strategic vent."

"She? Oh you mean the turian? How the hell did she get out?" I could hear that Mason was getting angry, but she understood our position, the more we got distracted the worse our chances of survival were.

"Ill explain later, what is important is getting out of here, preferrably with that nuke."

As I said that I finally got to the stairs leading down to DC, I jumped down the stairs and let the armor shock absorbers do their work, it still hurt but atleast the fall did not damage my legs.

Mason chose that moment to respond.

"Okay, i am in the bay and I see a shuttle, im making my way there."

He cut off the comms from his side so I could concentrate on laying the salvaged grenades on the doors weaker points. I set the grenades in equal interwalls on the center of the door, hoping to blow them open. Once I got done with that my suit started blaring warnings about the O2 level being below acceptable limits. After a second or two of that my suits automatic seals started up and I started breathing the even staler air of my armors emergency supply. The supply should last me for an hour at most.

I connected the grenades to my omnitool and set them to explode in ten seconds. I then activated them and ran behind the staircase, hoping that the thick metal would protect me.

 _10..._

 _9..._

 _8..._

 _7..._

 _6..._

 _5..._

 _4..._

 _3..._

 _2..._

 _1..._

 **BOOM**

The explosion was deafening, the only thing saving my hearing from permanent damage was my helmet muffling the explosion, although even the noise that got through was threatening to burst my eardrums. I got up and saw that the grenades had not blown the doors completely open, they had only bent the dcenter of the two parts of the door inwards, enough for me to dash through, albeit barely.

I dashed inside the room, only to come face to face with the biggest sniper rifle I had ever seen. The turian had a, what I assumed to be, a smug grin on her face.

"Drop it."

It was a simple enough command, It was either that or get my head blown off. And I quite like my face as it it right now. So I made the logical step and dropped my pistol on the ground.

"Go and face the wall."

I complied, knowing that in the next few seconds I would see wether I ended up with a hole in my body and being dumped out of the airlock, or if I was captured and had a chance at surviving and getting a chance at fighting another day.

"Hands behind your back."

I complied and felt the hold of omni-cuffs tighten around my wrists. I let out the breath that I had been holding for the last few moments and relaxed.

"Now sit in the corner."

I turned around and sat on a metal box that was in the corner and looked at her as she relaxed a bit, although her sniper rifle was still trained towards me, ready to discharge it on me at the shortest notice. Taking some of my psychology lessons from school to heart and combining it with the general belief that if someone knew your name then you had a smaller chance at being executed.

"So... um, im Flight Lieutenant first class, Valmar Oakfield, . What is your name?"

She just looked at me funny, then barked out a quick laugh.

"My name is not important, but I am the head engineer of the _Revenge_ , if you must know. Big bro is going to be so proud of me retaking an entire ship."

While she was distracted I activated my helmets comms three times, enough to catch Masons attention hopefully and signal him to leave and look for the fleet on his own.

Just then I saw her omnitool omnitool activating and a voice coming from it.

"Solana, are you okay, where are you? I heard what happened to your ship but my probes in your omnitool say that you are still alive."

"So you were spying on me? Again?" she deadpanned.

"Oh shush, I am your brother, spying on your little sister is in the job description. But that is not the point, where are you?"

"Oh I dont know, seeing as my ship was boarded by humans and I seem to be the only survivor it is pretty much granted that I have no clue of my location. Besides, we are currently in FTL anyway."

"By the spirits, what happened?"

"Oh I was just there fixing the DC console when a big crash came, followed soon after by gunfire and death screams, then I let myself be captured by a human to see their numbers and now I am holding the same human captive as I vent the ship of any and all breathable air."

"Sure sis, you "let" yourself be captured. Oh and some of my locator programs just got your position, you are in the Shadow sea system, nearing the relay leading to Omega."

"Okay Garrus, Just come by to pick me up, ill hold down the fort till you get here."

"Will do Solana, destination locked in, now if you dont mind, Ill go and calibrate my weapons some more. Vakarian out."

The channel closed and it left the now identified Solana Vakarian and me in a tiny room with her pointing a sniper rifle at me.

"You just have to rub it under my nose that you are older, dont you bro?"

 _The speech given by general_ _Leonard_ _Church, battle of Corkenstein._

 _"Soldiers of humanity, as of 20 minutes ago all friendly contacts from orbit have either retreated or been destroyed. I know you are tired, I know you feel beaten. But today we will not run, today we will hold, for we are on the finest piece of realestate in the sector. They cannot orbitally bombard us and have to send their ground troops at us. They expect us to run, to turn our backs towards them and give them an easy victory. But we shall not. Let us hold, in the name of Earth, our home. So let us prove these alien bastards that we are not sheep, by not running, by not hiding. We shall meet them on the field of battle and show them what being human is all about. Show them that the stubborness of humanity is a force to be feared, and that they made a grave mistake by coming here. Grab your weapons men, and give our chicken friends up in orbit a battlecry that will make them think twice about coming here. But if they do come, then we will fill their bellies with lead. And if we run out of lead we will strangle them with their own guts._


	8. Chapter 8

AN: Ok people, I know some of you might hate me, I understand. But I confirmed that there is indeed a curse on fanfiction writers. Two months ago my computers files were corrupted so I could not use my admin powers anymore. I used a few bypasses and temporarily regained control and set my computer on factory reset so I could use it again. The reset wiped out all my half completed chapters, all of my notes and all my personal files. So bye bye research paper that I had been writing for most of the year. With those files I lost my motivation that I just now am starting to regain.

CH:8

What followed after my capture was hours of just staring at the wall, I tried to turn around once to just relieve the boredom but was awarded with a pistolwhip to the face, with my own pistol no less. She had repressurised the ship not long after we felt a tremor in the ship and curses from Solana.

The tremor was most likely Mason breaking out of the hangar by blowing the doors because Solana had the door control override in the DC console.

Nothing happened for a while after that, neither of us spoke. Me because she might find me irritating and execute me, turians were pricky like that. And she because she was probably disgusted by my species.

All was quiet until there was a loud thump that reverberated through the ship. As soon as the unmistakable sound of a docking tube attaching itself to the ship came, it ended, replaced by the sound of Solanas omnitool beeping.

This time she opted to take a silent call, meaning that the omnitool transmitted everything to the speakers in her helmet. I gathered that because I could hear some clicks and something else that my translator could not pick up on but didn't hear the other one on the line.

Then I realized that this was my chance, she was distracted by whoever was on the other end of the transmission.

There was another crate on my right, it looked sturdy enough and so I took my chance. I was up as fast as it was humanly possible, I did not wait for her to react, propelling myself behind the crate.

Her cry of alarm told me that she was aware of my escape attempt. The sniper round that sailed millimeters past my torso gave me further proof of that.

I slid behind the box, only realizing that it was not a box, it was the local server of the DC console. Another shot slammed over me, suppressing me. There was a red light shining in the server box, a red blinking light.

I then decided to follow the age old law of 'when in doubt, smash the red button'. Well in was not a button, but still, it's the thought that counts. My fist shattered the weak plastic cover that was covering the circuitry and wires, going straight through the layer of protection and smashing into the circuitry.

I could feel an electric current going through my armor but the nonconductive under armor negated any risk to me from that.

What posed a more serious risk was the instantaneous loss of gravity and how the ship suddenly fired its emergency maneuvering thrusters. If that was not catastrophic enough, I could feel the air escaping at a rapid pace, the sound of many doors opening following that.

The drastic change of conditions gave me a chance. With gravity gone, my turian guard was knocked off balance, she was suddenly floating and was being dragged through the open door by the rapidly escaping air.

The change in gravity came to me as a surprise too, my cover was useless now because I was not behind it anymore. The ship was spinning around us and so small debris were flying everywhere.

Solana regained control of herself faster than I did. The pistol unfolding in her hand as she drew it from her hip. The first shot glanced off the armored plate on my chest, the second buried itself in the small crack where my lower chest armor met the lower one. The hits and the sudden pain shooting through me made me lose any control I had over my movement in the vacuum. To make matters worse, a conduit decided that it was overloaded at that moment and exploded, propelling me in some random direction.

I span out of control, hitting my head on a piece of rubble and then it was pure darkness for me.

 _*Warning, internal oxygen supply levels critical, Oxygen at 10%*_

The voice of the synthesized female voice went through my helmet, waking me with a minor electrical jolt from my armor a second later. The shock was enough to make me come out of my blacked out state, allowing me to regain awareness of what was going on around me.

I was floating in a room that looked like it had seen better days. It was full of floating rubble and half of the ceiling was gone, exposing everything to merciless space. It was a small miracle that I had not floated out from the hole yet.

My hud was red, signaling that I had a sealed hardsuit breach and less than 10% oxygen remaining. If the electric shock had not woken me up, that would have. Noone wanted to suffocate in space. I began to look around frantically, looking for any way I could save myself from death by asphyxiation. I spotted a doorway that was blocked off by a load of rubble and a small open trapdoor leading out of the room. I reached for the nearest object that was not floating, a collapsed support beam, and pulled myself towards the trapdoor, grabbing ahold of the open lid when I reached it.

I pushed myself down to the floor and stabilized myself with the help of the lid. When my boots touched the ground I engaged the magnetic locks built into my boots and placed my legs on the ladder and started climbing down.

The small hallway the ladder led me to was not in any better condition than the room I was in before, it was full of rubble and with cracks running through the walls. I continued onwards, pushing through the rubble to move forward.

 _*Warning, internal oxygen supply levels critical, Oxygen at 9%*_

9% now, goddamnit. I got my accelerated breathing back under control, saving some precious oxygen and probably buying myself a few more seconds.

When I reached the end of the small hallway I spotted a weapon floating around, a turian heavy pistol, no idea what it was doing in here. As I was passing by anyways, I swiped it from the air, depositing it on my hip. Never know when one might have need of it. I walked a bit more, finally figuring out which part of the ship I was in. I was in the lower maintenance deck. The maintenance tunnels went through most of the ship so that engineers could fix the not so easily accessable things.

Then a face entered my field of vision. Immediatelly I was on full alert and had my new weapon trained at the face. Only then did I realise what it was. The frozen turian corpse floated past me. It looked like a younger turian. There was a stream of blood floating from its split-cheeked face and its helmet was still in its hand. He must have died when putting his helmet on to protect himself from the unforgiving vacuum. Realising that a corpse was no threat, I reholstered the pistol.

I pushed on after that, rounding a corner and reaching another ladder that led out of the maintenance hallway. Taking the risk and praying for the room above to have an unblocked door, I detached the magboots and pushed myself upwards, grabbing ahold of the handle on the trapdoor to hold myself in place. As luck would have it the trapdoor was not on lockdown because its lock shone green. So I twisted the handle and pushed the trapdoor upwards.

As soon as the trapdoor opened a huge gust of air hit me, almost making me lose my balance and get pushed away because of it. That didn't happen luckily and I was able to hold on as the last signs of air left the room above me. As soon as the gust of air was done I pushed the hatch fully open and propelled myself up into the room.

Luckily the room I went into was not as damaged as the one I had woken up in, although there were still a fair few objects flying around, ranging from personal objects of the crew to even a piece of bluish goo that looked suspiciously like turian excrement.

 _*Warning, internal oxygen supply levels critical, Oxygen at 8%*_

The automated warning broke me out of my disgust for the floating piece of shit and made me move onwards towards less damaged areas of the ship. The doorway, by a stroke of luck, was not blocked or locked and allowed me through, though again, I had to fight against air escaping from the hallway.

I closed the door as soon as I was through the doorway, trapping some of the air in with me, although a small amount. My suits sensors told me that the air was way too thin for a human to breathe. So I continued pulling myself onwards, no longer hampered by large pieces of debris floating around I moved pretty fast and was on the next door in seconds.

I unsealed the door, letting the air rush into the corridor where the air was a lot thinner than in the room, eventually equalizing. I saw my O2 counter slowly starting to tick up now that the external scrubbers could filter out some of the oxygen from the thin air and store it in the internal air supply, releasing the built up carbon from the scrubbing unit at the same time.

And so I went, emptying every room with a green access panel of air and thickening up the overall room with oxygen, carefully staying away from yellow marked doors as those most likely were compromised to space. I pulled my helmet from my head when the air had finally thickened up to a level where I would not choke when removing my helmet and would not have my skin flash frozen from vacuum.

As soon as it came off I took a few lungfulls of the thin air to relax. When that moment of relaxation was over I felt an itching sensation in my chest. I received a great shock when I glanced down on my chestplate. There was flash frozen blood on my armor. There was a good amount of it aswell. Then I remembered the bullet that hit me. I commanded my armor to detach the upper plate of my chestplate, pulling it off as soon as the internal locks thunked open.

On the right side of my chest, there was a single hole in my undersuit, although it looks like it stopped pretty much all of the power behind the sand grain sized bullet that came out of the turians gun. Good thing the armor had automatic medigel injectors and managed to close the wound and subsequently, the hole in my armor. If it had not, I would be just another frozen corpse, floating in the middle of a wreckage. A sight that is common amongst many thousands, if not millions of battlefields in space.

The damage to the skin was minimal, my alliance gen 1 genemods having hardened my skin years ago. I picked out the small dark piece of metal stuck in my broken skin. I sighed in relief after observing it for a few seconds. It looked like a normal bullet, not an irradiated or some other nasty round that slowly kills the targets it has wounded. I threw the small piece of matter away, watching as it floated away along with some dark red drops of blood.

I sighed and pulled on my helmet. A quick glance showed me that the internal air supply was still having oxygen concentrated into it. Advancements in genetic manipulations have allowed humans to breathe air with a lot larger oxygen concentration by enhancing the haemoglobins in the bloodstream to be capable of absorbing more oxygen for longer periods of time. That allowed for the air mix in a hardsuit to have a lot more oxygen in it and thus, last longer. That single modification more than doubled an alliance marine's lifespan in open space warfare.

As I floated in the air aimlessly, waiting for my helmet to signal when I would be ready to move out again, I got hit with how desperate my situation actually was. I was in a piece of a turian frigate, drifting in outer space with zero control over my movements, with finite air, food and water, with no way off the wreck that I know of.

I went blank, no thought went through my mind for a while as I wallowed in my misery, not even trying to suppress it. Then thoughts started going through my mind again, whispers of doubt, of ending it right there, just to avoid the suffering that was sure to follow, the hunger, the thirst and the lack of air. My hand even started twitching towards the pistol I had pulled off the dead turian.

That's where I drew the line, mental walls slammed down on the despair, crushing it and forcing my hand away from the pistol. I was a human, and humans are made of sterner stuff than that. Besides, there are so many beings who would gladly off all humans, why make their life easier.

I started moving about again with my despair crushed and control re-achieved. The oxygen meter was at a comforting 100%, telling me to stop lounging around and do something.

The first thing I did was to access several consoles that were set next to the doors, redrawing all the air in the separate rooms and locking all the doors with a single password so that only I could access them, I was paranoid. I overloaded the internal sensors in the rooms, allowing all of the precious oxygen to be drawn into the rooms and leaving some excess gasses out.

I quickly activated a mapping program on my omnitool to make sure I find my way back to this air supply station.

Only when I was sure I could not put more of the gas in the makeshift storage rooms and that the program was running did I open the door on the other side of the hallway, getting a slight push as the leftover gasses escaped into the vacuum. The hallway after the door had slightly more rubble floating about, nothing else major to note so I re-sealed the door behind me, marking it with a bit of omnigel that colored itself green. Then I started my scouting trip inside the now derelict frigate.


	9. Chapter 9

All was quiet, only the normal sound of aircars zooming around in the late night Armali airspace. Tarraya Kyaos was bored, nothing interesting had happened for _years_. 'And I gave up patrol duty for _this'_.

The guards of the Armali central power station were always bored, that was a fact. There was nothing to really guard, a bunch of automated systems and VI cores that managed the plant itself and the dozen or so technicians making sure it all ran smoothly. To guard the technicians the Armali council had decided to post a permanent squad of huntresses.

Tarraya Kyaos was one of those few guards there. She had been posted at the main entrance with two of her battle sisters. Nethia was currently on patrol between the crates that were stacked infront of the entrance and Anyala was with her at the door.

"You see the presentation of the newest Serrice combat software package?"

Anyala was purple as a ganala plant when it came to experience, she was the youngest daughter of an influential family and they had probably gotten her the safest, most well paying position from where she could gain experience.

Because she was so purple she didn't adhere to the standard guard protocol to be quiet and observe the surrounding area. She was laid back against the wall and was browsing the extranet with her omnitool, leaving only Tarraya to keep a lookout.

"No, I haven't, are they any good?"

The kid might be purple as a ganala, but she had the right idea. It was boring as a salarian mating ritual, nothing ever happens here, nothing will happen if she has a bit of a conversation with her fellow huntress.

"They had some kickass new stuff, an omnitazer for civilians and they managed to lengthen an omniblades duration by ten seconds."

"That sounds nice, the civvies will finally have something to stop those two bit thieves with knives from holding them up, makes our job easier."

"Yeah, don't even get me started on those bastards. During my brief stint in the mid rim of the city I had to deal with so many of them."

'huh, so maybe she isn't as purple as I thought'

"The mid rim? How long did you work there?"

"A decade, I didn't want to see another maiden who lost her firstborn to a batarian babysitter. Who the hell would fall for that old slavers trick?"

"We had none of that in the outer rim, people there either went missing by the families or were outright killed."

Anyala had nothing to say about that. Instead, her face scrunched up with worry.

"Shouldn't Nethia be back already? She's been on her route for an awful long time."

Tarraya turned to assure her but then saw a shape coming from the perimeter. She felt relief that her battle sister had returned.

"Look at that, we start speaking about you and you come running. We were worried for a second."

Anyala turned to greet her as well but froze as Nethia came close.

"When did you change your armor?"

Now that Tarraya started to think about that, her armor is off, the breastplate is way smaller and the secondary color of it was white instead of beige. Nethia didn't respond verbally, instead, her hand flew to her pistol that Tarraya noticed was for some reason, suppressed.

Before either of them could react, Anyala's brain was decorating the wall, the shot had carved straight through her kinetic barrier and through her head.

Tarraya flashed her biotics and pushed the attacker into the stacks of boxes. However, before she could put up a barrier or call for backup, her head was atomised by a 50 caliber BMG round travelling at 853 meters per second.

The round, while solving the problem of the guard, had also tripped the external sensors of the facility and now an extra pair were on their way to check out what had happened.

"2-2, are you hurt? Still combat effective?"

The woman that was thrown into the boxes pushed herself up with a groan. The brief flight and sudden stop had done her no favors, but she could still fight, that's what's important.

"I'm good 1-1, clearing the doorway."

Another female soldier stepped out of the shadows and picked up the one that was shot and dumped her behind a box. 2-2 did the same to the other one and the other one wiped down as much of the gore as possible.

Just as it all looked presentable, the door opened, allowing another two Asari outside, this time one of them had the markings of a commando squad leader.

"We had a sensor detect something metal flying through here and It was suppose to impact around here. You two hear anything?"

The two prayed that the voice modulators would work with the samples they got from the real guards's talk.

No my lady, no sounds here. Maybe the sensors are on the fritz again?"

The elder commando looked weirdly at 2-2 and she knew she was made. A quick hand signal to her partner had her put her pistol to the Asari's back of the head and pull the trigger. The other Asari could only watch in shock as how her leader was executed by her 'fellow guard'.

"What ar….."

Before she could even complete her sentence, 2-2 had pulled out her own pistol and shot her in the face.

"Clear, Bravo, move up, Alpha guard the perimeter, Sev, exfiltrate."

As soon as the orders had left the mouth of 1-0, the overall commanding officer of the attack, several shapes emerged from the shadows, four of them setting up an ambush for any possible reinforcements while five formed up on the now open door.

"Remember, for Earth."

All of them echoed "For Earth" before running after him into the facility. The first person they met was a technician who was checking on a console, paying them no mind. 2-3 didn't waste the ammo and slit her throat, almost severing her head with that oversized knife of his.

The next stop was the guard post that was halfway to the control room. All of the guards in there were playing cards or having a nap. Not even considering the possibility of being attacked. So it came as a surprise when a thick white smoke started seeping from a canister that was rolled in the room. For the first few seconds there was no reaction, then the streams started. Multiple pairs of fists and even some biotic attacks impacted the suddenly locked door for another five seconds after that. Then it all went quiet.

By that time the team had already moved forward, protecting one of their own in a diamond formation and executing any Asari they came across.

Finally they made it to the control room door. They couldn't use the gas because they were afraid to use the consoles. So they had to clear it the old fashioned way. The door was locked but a quick knock on it and it was opened by an Asari commando.

"So what happe….."

She didn't make it any further before she noticed the myriad of weapons pointed at her and was promptly filled with lead, her barriers not being able to stop the volume of fire. The squad quickly charged amongst the confused Asari and started slaughtering them.

The commandos partner dived towards a big red button on the wall, with the half full mug of human coffee still in hand. She was riddled with bullets before she made it though, ending her life quickly. But nothing was stopping her momentum, although her body was dead, it still impacted the button, triggering the alarm.

"Shit"

The commander jumped on the horn with other units. "Alpha, be advised, we have hostile en route, be prepared for contact within the next five minutes."

Then he switched frequencies. "Overlord, this is Armali 0-1 we are compromised but our objective is secure for the moment. Armali 0-1, out."

"Armali 0-1, be advised, local commando bases lit up like a Christmas tree with activity. You will have hostiles on your doorstep in five mikes. All other commando teams have already completed their objectives aside from the orbital team. They have had an equipment error and say they need another ten minutes to do their part. Hold onto that station. How copy?"

"Roger that Overlord, holding station."

He turned to the rest of the team and started barking out orders for them.

"Slicer, get that bomb in the reactor chamber, just as we practiced. Ark, you and me will cover the main hallway incase they break through Alpha squad, 2-2, keep Slicer company and see to it that he lives long enough to plant that bomb if there are any automated systems. Fixer, man the monitors and keep us informed on enemy movements."

All of the troopers gathered there nodded their ascent and started following their orders. 2-2 followed Slicer through a narrow tunnel and a few doors with warning signs plastered on them and radiation suits lining the walls. The last door took a bit of time to open and by the time they had it open the unmistakable sounds of explosions shook the compound, along with the callous on the battlenet. Ever so often a casualty was called out until the final surviving member of alpha team called out.

"Goddammit, Wraith is down, I repeat, wraith is down. Be advised Boss, they are going to overtake me any second now, you'll be swimming in blue bitches any moment now"

We could hear his minigun revving up for its next burst.

"I'll make the end memorable…. COME GET SOME HUMAN DICK, YOU BLUE SLUTS."

His minigun could be heard for a few seconds until an loud crack signified him meeting the wall and being splattered across it.

The door opened and I moved ahead of Slicer on the narrow walkway, ready to face some automated defences. Defences that seemed to be absent from the reactor chamber.

We made it to the shielding unit and I left Slicer to set it up while I guarded his back. The sounds of battle had moved on to the corridors of the facility.

Suddenly Slicer started cursing in his weird colonial accent.

"Kuurat. Fuck, work damnit."

I turned to him, hoping that all the sacrifices made today were not going to go to waste.

"What's wrong Slicer?"

A few extra curse words made it out of his mouth before he answered me.

"The body detonator won't connect, we have a faulty signal receiver on the bomb and I doubt we have enough time for me to fix that."

Not good, not good at all.

"Boss, we have a problem. Remote detonation is a no-go, the receiver is busted."

I could hear the sounds of intense fighting on the other end of the link, explosions from explosive ammo used by the troopers was really fucking up the Asaris day by the sound of it.

"Affirmative 2-2, tell Slicer to set it to manual detonation, Ark is down and me and Fixer won't last long anyways, been an honor serving with you troopers."

I looked to Slicer who just nodded and started messing with some wires on the bomb, connecting a datapad to it and started typing away.

"Overlord, this is Armali 0-1, our bombs signal receiver is a dud and we are switching over to manual detonation. Awaiting you call on when to detonate."

" Copy that Armali 0-1, orbital team has just gotten to their objective, they are clearing it now. Estimated time until detonation, T-minus two minutes. Hold on."

Just then an eerie silence fell over the facility. It was only broken by Fixers whisper over the comm channel.

"For Earth."

Then a loud explosion rocked through the building, shaking it so much that I lost my footing for a moment. Slicer was shaken as well but he remained upright. He put down the datapad and pulled me over to it.

"Press the green button when the time comes, I'll hold the door."

I just nodded and took cover behind a piece of the ornamental railing, popping up my Rorch mk2 railgun dmr and sighted the other side of the hallway. Slicer took cover by the doorway at the end of the walkway and started physically pulling the door closed.

As he was exposed the first commando rounded the corner and lifted her gun, only to get her head blown off. I popped the casing out and thus was powerless to help as the next commando put a burst into Slicer. The barrier stopped the first few rounds but then broke through to puncture the lightly armored stealth suit he had to wear.

He was on the ground in a second, the rounds having made Swiss cheese of his torso and chest. The Asari commando teams charged onwards, laying down suppressive fire and preventing her from doing anything against them.

"Armali 2-2, the orbital team has done it's work, we are waiting for you to start the party."

Without giving myself time to think about it, I threw myself out of cover and at the bomb. The massive amount of suppressive fire overwhelmed my barrier immediately, cutting through me and leaving me bleeding on the ground.

My sudden Das had surprised the Asari so much that they had stopped firing and approached me as I dragged myself slowly onwards towards the datapad.

"Uhh, do we take prisoners?"

One of the Asari asked her squad leader. Before she could answer to her subordinate, I forced my own answer out of my throat at a volume heatable to them.

"I don't."

With that I forced my finger on the green button on the pad and detonated the bomb, immediately consuming me and all the commandos in the facility. The explosion forced the reactor to go critical, exploding in an explosion large enough to be seen from space as an orange flood.

The overload caused by the explosion carried over the huge city state, destroying electronics plugged in to the main grid, also having the effect of overloading the city's orbital defense grid.

That same explosion was repeated across the planet, in every major city, destroying the infrastructure maintaining the orbital defence stations around the planet.

As chaos descended over the planet and airspace, groups of freighters got into formation and revealed hidden weapons which they used to indiscriminately rain down fire on the planet. The independent orbital facilities maintained by the Asari space program turned its guns on the shocked defence force and laid into it, tearing apart the lone dreadnaught like wet paper in the first salvo and taking shots at civilian ships when they didn't have military ones in their targeting reticule.

The small amount of Asari fleet element over Thessia were in total disarray, the platforms they were supposed to supplement had been turned against them. The fire was dying down fast though, as the automated platforms ran out of energy stored in backup capacitors and turned into giant paperweights.

The remnants took no chances, obliterating any station that had fired at it, remaining smaller frigates and light cruisers went to engage the small transports that were still firing their cannons at the surface, killing thousands with each shot. As the defence forces engaged the freighters, a stream of Asari vessels came out of ftl near the battle, too far out to help but lessening the distance at a fast pace.

The main home defence fleet was never stationed over Thessia, instead being broken into smaller patrol fleet and the main force that was stationed at the mass relay to catch any invaders while they are exiting the mass relay one by one.

The patrol force that was stationed over Thessia was largely obliterated by the time that main force made it there to reinforce them, few remaining and those that were still in the fight were mostly heavily damaged. The orbit was filled with debris and bodies. Everywhere there were rapidly cooling ship hulls that were venting air, clumps of frozen bodies signifying where there had been a hull breach and small clouds of metal where there was nothing much left of orbital stations or ships.

The mostly intact human force used the chance and accelerated into ftl, heading towards the mass relay that now had a severely understrength flotilla defending it.

It is unknown to the galaxy the exact number of casualties either side sustained. Council controlled news agencies report human casualties in the hundred thousand range along with the destruction of the remaining Alliance fleet core strength. Private networks and conspiracy theorists suggest more realistic numbers, couple thousand in manpower and hundreds of small modified freighters

The asari lost over two billion civillians (casualties are still being counted to this day), their newest dreadnaught fresh from the dockyards, the _Light of Athame_ went down with all hands. The whole flotilla that defended Thessia was counted as lost, surviving ships were scrapped because it was cheaper to build new ships from them than to repair the ships. The flotilla numbered 24 cruisers and 68 frigates.

Overall it was a massive victory for the humans for the moment, having destroyed the heart of the galactic economy and temporarily crippling their enemies. But the success of that attack had a major flaw, the asari started fighting harder than ever before, almost never taking prisoners and not even trying to differentiate civilians from actual combatants. The asari took a more direct role in the conflict, replacing turian forces patrolling borders, giving more fround forces to the fight and even occupying some systems where the turians were seeking to pull out to move to other hotspots.

Overall the attack bought some much needed breathing room for the humans but worsening their overall situation in the long run by ruining any possible peace that the asari had been voicing support for before the attack and unleashing another enemy on themselves.

AN: So I got a suggestion from Mularac to make something like this. And yes dude, I know it's a mess, it's a source of many a headache for me.


End file.
